


Some Kind of Clandestine

by bleibt



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Gen, M/M, eventual discussion of PTSD, everyone is kind of a hedonist, set in 1920's Berlin, some laudanum/morphine addiction, sort of slow build?, they just don't talk about it, which is like the new little black dress I swear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2013-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:49:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bleibt/pseuds/bleibt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The word on the street is there's a good time for everyone in New York- that Paris is full of bright, bold new visions.  But if a man wants to really <i>live</i>? He goes to Berlin- where the night is a quick friend to make.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sodii over on good ol' tumblr](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Sodii+over+on+good+ol%27+tumblr).



> i wish i had a decent excuse for this thing, but i really don't

In Michigan, all they had talked about was how New York was exploding in the adrenaline rush of a war done and over with. In New York all they had talked about was how Paris was where everyone really ought to be. You might go hungry every other night but you would feel so much keener for it. And in Paris every conversation had eventually circled around to how it was nice to be there but if a person really wanted to live… Well, then they were better off hopping a train to Berlin. There, they stated softly, the shrapnel was gone but things caught fire still and burned through the dead of night and into morning. That was a life, they proclaimed. 

Remembering that the days had slipped into weeks without ever letting him actually feel the passage of time had left Jack thinking that maybe the ‘they’ of all those listened in on conversations had had it right. No one in Berlin spoke of another city shimmering on the horizon. In Berlin everyone laughed like the gold they were dressed in. Fake and genuine. 

Tonight there were North Sea winds slipping into the gilded night and bringing disorganized flurries with them. While they might as well have been rain during the day the sun was gone now and slowly, softly the streets were being dressed in white. Jack glanced up at the streetlight he passed. Each flake that landed on the glass globe hissed softly as it disappeared against what separated them from the slight flame. The smile that pulled his lips felt like an instinct as he stretched, like he could tangle his fingers into the streams of shifting winter air. Instead he let both limbs drop back to his sides with a puff of breath when he slipped off the main stretch of sidewalk and down the narrow street that was beginning to feel like a regular haunt in a maze of purposeful irregularity. The snow kept his footfalls quiet as he slipped down the small flight of stairs that led to the backrooms of a place that had made itself homey to him in spite of itself.

The door shut audibly behind him as Jack slipped through, pulling out the half filled paper cone he had tucked in to the pocket of his pants earlier. Here, it mattered less than in New York or Paris- any official in a uniform had something better to worry about than a kid with English on his tongue, no money in his pockets and maybe less than correct papers. But he still habitually employed what he had practiced, then perfected- the spot to look to never catch anyone’s gaze but it didn’t leave you with your head bowed and your shoulders hunched either. There had been crowds he’d passed through in New York and known somewhere in his gut that none of the faces he’d wandered alongside would have been able to offer up a description of him later. 

Now he slipped past private rooms that had doors closed in business or doors open in welcome that had a price. The second hall was unlit but grew suddenly into a space that was dazzling in comparison. Lined in dressing table mirrors, the light bulbs refracted back and forth- stretching the reflections into an impossible reality of give and take. Jack stepped across the floorboards to the only currently occupied space.

“Candied almond? There was a market on the way here. I couldn’t help myself.” He offered out the paper cone that had had some resistant kind of warmth to it when he’d first purchased it but had long since cooled. Toothiana jumped before giving the snack and the pale face reflected in the glass over her shoulder an exasperated look. She had instinctively dropped the tube of black liner she had been working with to avoid starting all over and she plucked it up again once more from the organized surface before her.

“Gods in heaven, Jack- Can’t you announce yourself like everyone else?” She got a low, amused hum in response as he hopped onto the clear edge of her dressing table, balancing there delicately so as not to disturb anything. Belatedly, the dark haired woman took one of the sugarcoated nuts that were still being held out to her and probably would be until she accepted. “And what,” she added, trying for stern but failing as she popped the almond between still unpainted and unlined lips. “Have I told you about using the back entrance? One of these days-“

“I can’t use the front to see you,” Jack protested easily over her, folding the ends of the paper back in over themselves and leaving what was left at the base of Toothiana’s mirror. They shared an affection for the seasonal creation. “At least not before you’ve started working for the night. They’ll think- Well, you know…” He trailed off with a loose wave of his hand that earned him a lightly arched eyebrow and a slight smile.

“I’m not sure anyone pays close enough attention to notice. And I’m almost certain both the back and front of this place have seen odder actual couples.” She flicked the small brush across the extensions she had stuck expertly along her lash-line minutes earlier. “Give it a try for my sake? I’d hate to see you get caught and thrown out- especially when your papers aren’t technically legal.” She kept her gaze on the younger man until he finally offered up a faint tug of his lips that seemed to hold some kind of consent in it. Though she knew better than to assume it was a promise.

“You look nice,” Jack stated instead. Toothiana always did but it was more defined with the gold, green, blue on her eyelids and lashes that could have been feathers. The loose braid she refused to cut into a bob with the times set off the jewel tone of her dress. A study in green and gold clashing against black. The expressionists would have lined up to paint her if they were privy to this world in between private and employment.

“Let’s hope the crowd agrees.” Her fingers interlocked to still one of the nervous flits they were so prone to. People, she had explained after hours one night as she pulled on her coat, paid for what they wanted not what they needed in their suspended society. 

She had left the recovering streets of Brussels with some half formed intention to continue everything field nursing had given her within the walls of a hospital. To maybe take what she had picked up under the dentist turned doctor who she had reported to and turn it into a more specialized assistant position. But that was the dream and it was a popular one. She bartered her conversation and traded in dances instead- spinning like there was flight under her skin and dying to forget that it was always ‘someone will always hire you, face like that. Where was your mother from again? South Asia?’. Their city was a budding metropolis of a steel-jawed trap. She didn’t have the means, monetary or otherwise, to break free.

“And where is your coat, for Christ’s sake-?” she tossed out, tone scolding, to shake away the tension that had wormed up her spine and settled into her arms. “It’s freezing out.”

“Didn’t think I needed it,” Jack hummed, watching the older woman adjust the slim bracelets at her wrists. She leaned back far enough to glance down.

“At least you wore shoes this time,” Toothiana sighed with something that was distinctly like surrender. Seeing him balance, barefooted, on the rail of his rented balcony one night had been one time too many. It had been all simultaneous strength and fragility- branches in storm strength wind. But she hadn’t cared for the feeling that she was watching something else entirely. She didn’t trust herself to say the right thing if she wandered too far into the life of this man who was still a boy in the sense he carried only the sharpest parts of youth around with him.

“Yeah, where the hell’s my merit badge at then?” Jack challenged with a narrow grin, swinging his feet back and forth in a pointed manner where they dangled above the wooden floor. He plucked Toothiana’s gold plated cigarette case up from by a tin of rouge. She’d stated something about ‘gift from someone persistent’ once.

“Those will ruin your teeth, your lungs, and everything in between,” she warned as he flicked it open with his thumbnail, stealing one out.

“Hypocrite,” the white haired man shot back swiftly, rolling the filtered cylinder between his fingers.

“It’s rude for me to turn them down,” was the almost terse reply on Toothiana’s lips before she let out a slow breath. Every night was a reminder that her heart was invested in and living somewhere else- sometimes that fact lingered on her tongue, not just the back of her mind.

“Alright, alright then-“ Jack muttered, exasperation disguising an apology. He was beginning to think that was why he stayed on here. Berlin was honest about its loneliness. It held it up like something to be exalted and aspired to. Paris and New York were too full of people hungering to reach out but starved to an ache by their own paranoia. Here they talked, they laughed- they saw the insides of each other’s rented rooms and narrow apartments because the days were short and sometimes wine was better in company. But they closed their doors at the end of each night and fell asleep as something singular. In the morning, last night’s friend could be deported, could leave for lack of funds, could be arrested. Friendship was a high priced commodity. It wasn’t affordable when each of them was striving for their own brand of vanity on no spare change. 

“… Have you been in the front yet?” He blinked as the dark haired woman paused in opening her tube of lipstick to offer him her lighter. More gold. More tokens of shots at affection. More sighs in the walls of what she called home because she should be grateful but couldn’t always make herself believe it.

“Briefly, I had to speak with some people before I started work. Why…” The words stalled out as she glanced up at him. Lips parting for more than the application of makeup. Jack didn’t leave her hanging for long though- rushing ahead with what she had guessed, and wished wasn’t, the question on his tongue.

“Well-? Is he here?” He pressed, brow-line arched expectantly. “And don’t ask who. You know.” He could tell simply from the frown that creased the edges of Toothiana’s lips as she swiped red across them. There was a lie already forming in her throat but Jack hadn’t taken a thing at face value alone yet. And a lie felt more like admitting concern than honesty in that moment.

“… Yes, but Jack- I wish you would… I thought you were going to take a few nights off from this place as a whole.” And by proxy… She thought she knew why he drifted in night after night. That trick of light refracting that they all confused with warmth. “We’re all…” Not nearly as content as they could have been if, just maybe, they spent a little longer in the real world outside the doors.

“I don’t have much else to do,” he pointed out. He’d said he would try. Didn’t promise. He never really did. Life was too changeable for swearing on graves and gods.

“… Just be careful?” There was a yielding note in the dark haired woman’s voice again. “I’ve told you what I think.”

“And made it crystal clear too, Tooth.” He finally lit the snatched cigarette, setting the lighter down with a certain amount of delicacy. She glanced at him sideways as he dropped to the floor.

“Still?” Came the question in reply to the nickname.

“Hey, it’s not on me that your mother named you a mouthful,” he twisted enough to flash her a grin over his shoulder as he started for the door once more. For a few seconds she was able to watch him go in the mirror until the angles didn’t quite line up anymore. She knew she’d been fed a lie when they had first spoken through North. He was a different breed of wolf but a wolf all the same. Predators, not prey, survived on their streets.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was bullied into a quick update. my proof-reading is probably so lacking, oh gosh.

The front of the club was just as intent on keeping secrets as the back- it drowned them out with a mad rush din instead of tucking them away though unlike the halls already behind him. There were already plenty of tables filled and Jack double-checked the day of the week in the back of his mind. They were all on the same playing field though. Running on lean sleep for the sake of nights to burry days with. It was Thursday but time loved its tricks in their neighborhood. Sooner rather than later Toothiana would be out here, filling a seat here, a stool there. Flitting to the right hand-signals like a hummingbird to red or a moth to a lantern. He exhaled the lungful of smoke he had been holding into the haze that formed easily near the ceiling as soon as the doors were open. The smoke wasn’t exactly a habitual offense- on the frozen streets though, it was intoxicating to carry a slow burning ember at your fingertips and the energy inside the club felt more appropriate with your hands and mouth busy in any way you could manage. 

His eyes skipped over the tables in the middle under dim but clear lights, passed over the bar that promoted too much intimacy and too much distance side by side- He inspected the tables around the fringe edges instead. The ones that attracted patrons who thought talk was cheap and preferred a removed kind of observation instead. His next prolonged breath was shaped like a lazy smile. He hadn’t expected Toothiana to lie- if she had it would have been in the opposite direction- there was something giddy under his ribs anyway when his gaze finally stilled. Stilled on features that were all proud nose line and high-set cheekbones and thin, disinterested lips that could have been a perfect reversal of his own. 

A cigarette rush never lasted long but it was a fast acting cure for unrealized aliments. His steps felt like ghosting and there was a buzz of electricity feeding from his wrists to his hands as he wove been customers, both standing and sitting, to the booth of a table that whether in reality or by a trick of the light seemed more shadowed than its neighbors.

“This seat taken?” he questioned airily, gesturing more to the distinct void on the cushioned bench-like seat with the smoldering cylinder than his curled in fingers. There was nothing urgent about the way Pitch looked up at him, eyes critical as they slid over him with his brow line halfway to arched. After a lingering second a scoff of a laugh left his lips. “What’s so amusing?” Jack pressed, words escaping around the filter balanced in his mouth once more, arms half folded over his chest.

“Besides the fact you don’t look nearly old enough to be smoking that?” The dark haired man drummed his fingers near the base of his short glass. “Absolutely nothing.”

“What about you? Concerned at all about heart-failure catching up with you on the walk home?” Jack shot back dryly; dropping into the seat with a thud that countered the light sensation each drag of smoke sent crawling through his muscles and thoughts. There was a give and take to the times they crossed paths inside this establishment. 

Like a drawn out literary work, he was getting better at the pacing of their conversation. Some nights were laced with a brittle kind of violence. He would press his tongue to the roof of his mouth and pass on then. One night of almost blows had been enough. If for no other reason, his papers pressed a constant mantra of caution, when drawing attention to himself, into the back of his mind. Others were like this- not open but yielding with the same kind of freezing heat that came from pressing fingers to ice until it began to melt. 

It had taken the younger man several obsessive nights to have a name for the slim, neatly dressed shade of a man who had snagged in his peripheral vision the first night he’d wandered in. And when he’d laughed- ‘Pitch, really?’-and asked if his mother had an odd sense of humor the dark haired man had icily told him it was all he was getting. Be it his Christian name or not. So back he went until the other consented to conversation on good nights. Drinks on better nights. Toothiana tried to steer him toward a different way to occupy his unlit hours. He was too wrapped up in this game of a thing to afford a night off- hours that could be spent getting something new.

“That’s assuming I’m walking,” Pitch stated, twisting his cut glass slightly and watching the brandy push and shift against the edges. He had entertained the idea of trading out the drink for a different spirit. It hit his tongue like a blank dash on a list where everything had yet to be crossed out. The memory of something that had slipped his mind but a yawning blank where the object itself ought to be. It was a headache without a hangover. He watched with his lips set in a flat line as Jack knocked off a clump of ash into the tray. The candle beside it had either been extinguished or they had neglected to light it at all. He should have lashed out faster- but the younger man had a quick guile that he couldn’t ward off every night.

“Not enjoying the weather?” Jack chuckled, watching as the other pulled a cigarette free of his open case already laying on the nicked wood of the table. He held it into the flame of his lighter, gunmetal silver in contrast to the gold Jack had held earlier, until the tip of the cylinder dissolved into ash before he had bothered to inhale properly through it. “I am.”

“Yes, I’m not sure you’re making that _quite_ clear enough,” Pitch muttered, inspecting the vest that was buttoned over Jack’s pressed shirt and the distinct lack of coat that followed. Nothing across his shoulders or draped on his arm. The smile the light haired man flashed him would have been childlike if it wasn’t so lean.

“You should try going without sometime. Makes you feel more alive, “ he hummed as he extinguished the tobacco that had burned its way down to the filter against the shallow glass.

“Is that something you’re well versed in then-? Living and life?” The condescension and scorn written across his features were sharpened by the way his vowels stretched just a moment longer than the quick paced English the other spoke in. What had been a scowl shifted into a sneer around the rim of his glass as Pitch took a dragging swallow of his drink. He had decided months ago that this was a city full of too many bright, young things that played at understanding.

“I think I know more since coming here at least-“ Jack shot back, challenge surfacing in his voice. Bold and brash and bright as brass. Numb to threat. Pitch was dying for the thought to be pure spite but there were threads of something else in it.

“A few years ago boys like you, Jack Overland Frost, were dying nameless for nothing. And now look at you all. Scrabbling up the throne to make a grab for the crown you haven’t earned one bit,” Pitch hissed out with smoke that escaped around his tongue and teeth rather than between his lips. The younger man shot him a look from the corner of his eye. Like it was an act of defiance he reached down and tugged one of Pitch’s cigarettes free of their case- the dried leaf all neatly wrapped in brown instead of white.

“It’s not like-“ he stated roughly around the thin cylinder. Without the flame of the candle or the lighter in the older man’s possession he had no way of smoking it. “I came here thinking I’d be better for it-“ There was a tension in his shoulders as if he was steeling himself from the core out against the harsh strike of a blow that rested sharply in Pitch’s gaze even if it had no physical manifestation. “I don’t give a damn about being _better_ or _heightened_ or any of that salon talk.”

“Then why did you come here?” It was a challenge of a counter. Maybe people wandered in on accident. It was purposeful thing to struggle to live in these streets.

“… I don’t know,” the tension left Jack’s shoulders with the abruptness of a breeze dying down, following itself with a breathy laugh. “I don’t know,” he repeated, lips sliding into a narrow curve. “Guess I just followed the train tracks in. Or is that not good enough for you?” He’d thrown his dice down and held his hand of cards under the table blind. It was praying for the best when that wasn’t his kind of faith.

“I think it’s crass and careless.”

“But better than coming here looking for a higher purpose?” the younger man retorted, almost teasing as he did so. Things that should have been secrets were laid out in the public eye now- In the salons he had no interest in and the street cafes full of meandering service and drawn thin afternoons, Parisians talked about boys who had gilded eyelids and rouged cheeks who didn’t bother to wait until full dark to step out of their front doors. He couldn’t have stayed away if he had wanted to- Not when every intimacy he’d had before felt like something to be tucked away into a back pocket. Hidden and neglected to be mentioned again. 

Shame bored him. Men and boys who took more time with the kohl around their eyes than the uniforms they had once worn to the eastern edge of France must have known something about pride instead. There was no kohl around Pitch’s eyes, nothing painted on his lips to be smeared into an angry streak or black and blues to play at glamorous bruising with- only the natural deep setting of his eyes that played with the reality of vision and told the brain the skin around them could have been grey when he tilted his head just right to catch the shadows of the uneven lighting. There was a differently twisted kind of pride in the set of his bones and Jack could feel the ache that told him he was dying to know what that mirrored reflection of a mouth felt like every time he swallowed. The chuckle that chased his words from the older man was low and brittle in the dry note it hit.

“Idealist,” Pitch let the word issue out around the edge of his glass again like an accusation as he finished off the remainder of his drink. “ _Boys_ run on their gut instinct and courage, Jack. _Men_ know something of fear.” Jack gave him a skeptically wry glance despite the harsh grate of the words. He flipped the still unlit cigarette between his slim fingers, the same as any pen or pencil.

“Oh, I don’t know- Maybe I’ve been a bit too busy to waste my time cowering in corners until I feel grown up,” he knew it was a dare and a taunt of statement. Pitch only let him win things at the hands of a gamble.

“Still the words of a boy-“ the dark haired man shot back. Only they weren’t. Jack was his namesake. Frost froze into latticework with a speed that was dying to be forever young. It sank into the contracting, expanding wooden heart-cell of tree trunks and snapped, shattered, with a brutality that betrayed it was touched by time. Jack echoed with disturbing, nameless, familiarity in his frontal lobe. Sand through his fingers the faster he reached for what was evading him. His tongue pressed hard to the back of his teeth. He couldn’t do this guile-laced paradox of a man who wasn’t a child at all.

“And why are _you_ bothering then? If you aren’t after a different kind of living or trying to shake off your worries and leave them in a street gutter?” People did it every night when they left there houses- it was an almost physical thing to witness. But Pitch had none of that lightness around his shoulders. The constant buzz of the brassy tunes around them highlighted the silence that met his accusation and curiosity. Pitch eyed the empty glass before him and the warped circle of a world it offered through it. His thoughts were full of shade that twisted in on itself in circles. The snake that consumed its own tail. The white haired man beside him had become that snake these past few weeks- traipsing in loop after loop through his mind. When bitten you sucked the poison out. Starving it at its source seemed like a better, faster, alternative. Youth had a short attention span once it had what it wanted, no matter how bold that youth was. He would rid himself of whatever was lacing into his blood from this bite and with any luck his thoughts would quiet to not very much at all- as he preferred it. With a short breath he stood, gathering up his long coat as he went.

“Leaving so soon?” Jack flashed him an exaggerated pout around the wrapped filter, leaving it up to the other to decide if his disappointment was genuine or not. He was well aware it was but if playing it up and over-done got him farther then he’d throw honesty to the wind. “Here I was thinking it was open inquisition night since you were prying into my life so generously. Can’t stand to return the favor?”

“ _We’re_ leaving-“ Pitch corrected, finally tossing the other the silver case of his lighter. Evidently that was one smoke he wasn’t getting back. The playfully slacked look Jack shot him was full of mock outrage.

“Are you trying to get me home with you so you can take advantage of me?” He waved a finger at the older man in a scolding manner, tsk-ing as he snapped the lid of the lighter shut once more to stifle the flame there. “And in a not very tactful manner at all, might I add.”

“Oh, my apologies-“ Pitch retorted, smile thin and stiff. “Have I misunderstood? Have you been interrupting my nights these past few weeks because you came to Berlin to kiss _girls_ , Jack?” The laugh he earned was bright and clear under the din of the crowd around them as Jack did his best to still whatever it was skipping beats under his ribcage. He probably shouldn’t have bothered- It was probably far too clear that this was exactly why he’d been cutting into all of Pitch’s nights like a third party helping themselves to a dance.

“ _Damn_ , how did you catch on? I thought I was better than that,” he threw out as he slid clear of the table, the giddy something rising to take up residence in his throat. They kept to the fringe edges still as they made their way to the doors, the front this time- though Jack thought he managed to catch a glimpse of Toothiana seated across from another nameless suit, laugh on her features, as his gaze dragged over the crowd once more before stepping out into the polar opposite reality of the street.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we have arrived at the porn bit. gird your loins. (I'm going to warn for some slight autoerotic asphyxiation because I would much rather be safe than sorry.)

Why someone so disinterested with what the club had to offer and its regular proceedings, would bother to return there on a near nightly basis had been half a question in the back of Jack’s mind since he first caught sight of Pitch weeks back. The walk through Berlin’s now all but whited out streets supplied him with the answer. There were a few other local knipes and joints in the trek from starting point to destination but he could hazard a guess, that the warmth of the one they had left was the one selling the best quality of drink and plying its customers with the most refined music. In the same way he was utterly unsurprised when their silent- words kept slipping up to his tongue but he didn’t trust himself right now, oh god, did he not trust himself- walk ended before one of the city’s looming brownstones. Their sandstone facades exhaled a kind of old world elegance that the plaster covered walls of their brick companions could never hope for. 

There were candles perched in the windows of the ground level apartment, casting unsure hallows through the glass and onto the snow that had long since started to accumulate on the half inch of the panes’ ledge. Their light was the only thing really visible though, white linen curtains with delicate eyelets pulled as close into them as was safely possible to lend whoever resided there privacy from foot traffic. Foot traffic that, finally, finally included him. The thought had Jack pressing his tongue to the inside of his cheek as Pitch pulled his key ring from his pocket with ungloved and faintly cold stiffed hands. While a few degrees warmer than outside by law the lobby of the ground floor they stepped into was cool with lack of heating.

“Nice digs,” Jack let out a breath of a whistle, light eyes sweeping from the inset compass rose design on the stone flooring to the staircase that twisted around into a spiral, leading to the higher floors. Pitch shot him a look out of the corner of his eye.

“It serves its purpose.”

“Yeah,” the younger man snorted, his own hands tucked away into the pockets of his narrowly cut slacks now that there was nothing else for them to entertain themselves with. The evening’s second cigarette had been dropped, half finished but still thoroughly done with, into a slight snow bank meters back on the sidewalk- hissing for a prolonged second and forming a vertical trench in the flakes as it went. “So does mine. But it’s probably the size of your linen closet in total.” The dark haired man replied with a breath that could have been a disinterested hum. Jack hadn’t expected any less of him. He hadn’t expected anything less of Jack. His entire generation was filled people dying to starve for their art but with no actual art to martyr themselves over. Some scrabbling attempt at hedonism for the modern age.

“The third floor,” he stated out loud instead, starting the short climb with his hand curled around the worn wood of the banister. He could hear the younger man start up after him, shoes crisp on the stonework. After a passing the first landing Jack’s breaths went from silent to picking up a hum of a tune that had been brassy in the club earlier- fingers drumming along the wood gliding under them in time. “I don’t suppose you could be bothered to stop?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Jack arched a brow at the look the dark haired man threw him over his shoulder- pushing the soft sound a notch louder. He was met with a strained breath and further silence as they came to the third landing and the curved ledge of a hall with railing wrapped around its edge that comprised the public part of the floor.

“Well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist,” Pitch countered, shifting his grip on his keys as he gestured for them to pass the first door the landing offered and move to the second. “I would hate for you to wake my neighbor.”

“Why?” Jack snorted, leaning back against the plaster wall beside the high wooden door they had come to a stop before, hands pinned beneath his back and the fabric of his vest like they were in danger of betraying him somehow. “Does he not like it when you bring _boys_ over? Are you going to get _scolded_?” He skimmed his numb nails across the uneven and off white of the plaster- focus currently on the key being turned in the lock. Anything else felt too risky right now, he was side stepping being betrayed before he even made it over the doorstep. So far everything Pitch gave him came like the two sides of a coin. Half a lie. Half a truth. Brutal honesty that quickly became evasive vagueness- answers that you could brush your fingertips against but nothing to grab and hold onto. He had neither the inclination nor the time to return the favor. He would throw everything out in plain sight if asked but it was up to the other party to decipher what was really important. He would be damned if that got him thrown out on the grounds of inexperience, _inadequacy_.

“He likes his rest,” Pitch answered curtly, finally pushing the door open with an exaggerated wave of his hand and a sharply arched brow to indicate that Jack should go first. The younger man elected to follow the request without comment this time, snagging the doorframe as he pushed off the wall to step through with an airy swing of a step. 

If it hadn’t been clear after coming in off the street then it was all too apparent now that he was in a place out of his league. He heard rather than saw the other shut out the outside world, fingers flipping a switch the evidently brought the dim, wall mounted lights of the hall to life and left them with a kind of privacy the club had never afforded them. The deep colors of the wallpaper only served to lessen the potential illumination further.

“I suppose I should offer you a drink,” the words found Jack from behind like an offbeat rustle over your shoulder after dark on the street. The sort that left a person spinning around to take in the distinct lack of anything there- just in case. Pitch drifted past him, the gap between their heights making it impossible for their shoulders to bump but left their arms brushing in spite of it. He got the distinct feeling that he was being guided down a straight and narrow trail- that he wouldn’t see a single thing the older man hadn’t already determined was acceptable to show him. The glimpse of the kitchen he caught was fleeting- giving him only the impression of an organized space with no candles, lit or otherwise, to highlight the window that would have looked out on the building’s small courtyard if not for the drawn tight curtains. He hadn’t expected decorations to mark the approaching holiday but when thrown against the backdrop of the light laced streets the lack of them was stark.

“I’m old enough for a drink but not a smoke then,” he stated dryly. The sitting room they stepped into was large enough to be comfortable for four but the fact that it was only used by one was easily apparent. For a lingering moment the only source of light was behind them in the hallway, rendering Pitch an undetailed silhouette of a figure whose coat seemed to vanish into the carpet over the floorboards. The image shattered, as first the light on the baseboard table was tugged on- followed by its smaller counterpart on the end table of a surface by one of the chairs. Jack was left to take in a room that was lived in- the coal stove pressed to the far wall had retained its heat in the other’s absence- but devoid of the over-stuffed grandeur that was so popular amongst people who could afford it. Even the bookshelf was only half filled.

“I’m not required to offer you anything,” Pitch countered as he shrugged his outerwear off his shoulders, draping it over the high-backed chair closest to the potbellied stove’s warmth.

“And I didn’t say no,” the younger man quipped. He had no coat to rid himself, drifting over to the high set selves instead. Behind him Pitch gave him a look that went unnoticed.

“Please, feel free to make yourself at home,” he muttered, tone flat. Nothing on those shelves was anything like Jack’s business but the white haired man had already proven that some fights with him simply weren’t worth the energy of having. If it kept him quiet and amused him, he would bite his tongue. He stepped over to the long table set against one of the walls instead, reaching for one of the short bottles under the halo of light. He skimmed over the label with his thumb before biting into the thin paper with his nail- leaving a slight crease there. This was a rash call. This was the toxin he needed to stop before it hit home in the muscle of his heart. Jack seemed hell bent on beckoning the whole world into the mad dance of his impulses like it was an unconscious instinct. A will-o’-the –wisp hovering just off the beaten trail, luring travelers’ feet off the path and into the bottomless world of their bogs as they called out haunting refrains of names that meant nothing to them. He wanted no part of this madcap craze. His own decent was to be steady. He had planned it years ago in an army hospital bed where a blank white ceiling had played the sky. It’s lack of detail echoing his own lack of self in some sort of tidy metaphor.

“The Iliad? Dante’s Inferno?” The younger man listed the titles off, dragging his fingertips across the spines as the glasses Pitch pulled out clinked together softly. Some titles were English translations- other’s retained the mother tongue they had originally been written in. “Grimm’s Tales and Faust?”

“You seem confused. Are the words too big for you, Frost?” He stepped forward long enough only for the other to take the tumbler glass he had filled partway for him. Jack watched as he reclined in the chair that had only been occupied by his coat before. Pitch’s eyes were carefully narrowed at him over the rim of his glass as swallowed a slight mouthful of the amber drink. The smile across from him was crooked and utterly sure of itself.

“They just seem like the kind of books someone looking for answers buys,” Jack stated with a hum that could have been a chuckle as he leaned back against the shelves, shoulders digging into the narrow ledges of wood. His lips twisted into an exasperated grimace though as he took a sip from his own glass. “Is brandy seriously _all_ that you drink? Jesus-“

“I would try to stay away from attempts at insight if I were you,” the older man retorted cuttingly, ignoring the way the remark struck home like a bullet fired in still night air. “They don’t go well with that pretty face.” Jack laughed as he pushed himself away from the wood supporting his weight, a twisting updraft in the chill the slipped into the apartment from outside despite the walls. There was a swing in his steps that matched a beat that wasn’t there with them now. He took another sip of the spirit in his hand, ignoring the sour, burning something it left on his tongue as he came to a stop before Pitch’s bent knees.

“Flattery even after you’ve sweet talked me all the way upstairs?” he snickered, batting his lashes in a mockery of the move he’d seen Toothiana pull on far too many suitors who seemed to think there was actually something behind it. “You’re far too kind.”

“And you’re insufferable,” the dark haired man hissed up at him, a scowl on his lips in contrast to the grin Jack was peering down at him with. Nothing was ever quick with him. Jack Overland Frost wouldn’t have known how to pull shards from a wound with any kind of direct speed- much less just get on with it so he could get on with dismissing him from his house- if his life depended on it. He drummed his fingers agitatedly on the cloth-covered rest under his arm.

“I _know_ ,” the younger man groaned from above him in overplayed agony, free hand clutching at the vest and shirt buttoned over his heart with remorseless humor. “But since you already have to tolerate me and since I was so, so nice about answering your questions will you answer some of mine?”

“Oddly enough, I would rather not-“ Pitch held the next mouthful of his drink on his tongue for an extended second before downing it tightly. “I didn’t ask you up here so I would have an audience to recite the trivia of my life to.”

“Hmm…” The hum was muted but acknowledging as Jack set his all but untouched glass down on the end table- his interest in it lost. He shifted, rolling forward onto the balls of his feet slightly as he leaned into the other and leveled the few inches between them that were temporarily in his favor. The frown 

Pitch flashed him in place of a response was crooked and taut as Jack curled his grip around the armrests that framed him. Wordlessly, the younger man eased himself between his legs- nothing but surety in the few steps it took for him to knock his own knees against the edge of the chair’s seat. “I could always kiss you in between questions if that sweetens the pot.”

“You wont pry any promises out of me. Particularly when you talk so much and do so very little, _Jack_.” He simply met the intimately low hiss of his name with a laugh that jarred and snagged in his throat. His thumbs pressed harder against the upholstery under them as he tipped forward and stole away the lack of contact that had lingered between them. He pressed his lips against Pitch’s with a laid bare and snatching kind of urgency- like the mouth under his belonged to the presence felt in a dark room before the light was flicked on and you remembered you were alone. For a moment all he could feel was the hard set line of something less than a frown before the tension snapped and Pitch leaned into with the same raw kind of something- back no longer flush with the slight cushioning behind it. He drew in a breath through his nose, nails pressing into the threads deeply colored threads as he felt an arm snake around his waist, gripping at the fabric of his pants and shirt where they met at his hip. 

“Tell me where you’re from at least,” Jack exhaled, pulling back just enough to make the words comprehendible as he flicked the tip of his tongue against the winter dry seam of Pitch’s mouth. He followed it quickly with a harder kiss to the corner of the older man’s lips- right hand moving to press flat against the back of the chair beside the other’s head.

“England,” there was no focus or enthusiasm for the answer as Pitch un-tucked the shoddy job Jack had only half bothered with while getting dressed hours earlier. Next to the warmth in his palms the younger man might as well have still been carrying the chill of the streets around with him on his own skin. He scratched his nails up the barely there bumps of Jack’s spine, earning himself a low hum and a firmer still kiss at the other side of his lips.

“Fancy that,” Jack muttered, rolling his eyes as he propped one of his knees up on the seat between Pitch’s neatly clad legs, forcing him to spread them a notch more. He ran his own slightly chapped lips across the neat line of the dark haired man’s jaw- a shiver wracked him unconsciously as the fingers under his shirt made their way across his shoulder blades, digging in to the skin there in the shape of crescent moons with untimed aggression. “I meant where from there. It’s a good sized chunk of land- in case you’ve forgotten.”

“What does it matter-“ the dark haired man stated thinly through his teeth. He snared the fingers of his unoccupied hand in the should-have-been-impossibly-light hairs at the base of Jack’s skull. He yanked at them, hard, to drown out the mental roar of streets with no names that sprang to mind when he tried to fit the words ‘home’ and ‘before’ together in his thoughts. He held the other’s head still, their eyes locked, despite the groan of protest it resulted in. “When I don’t ever plan to bother with a return journey-? Leave well enough alone before I decide you aren’t worth the headache, _boy_.”

“ _Fine_ \- Have it your way then-“ Jack laced the word with agitation of his own as he reached blindly behind him grab at the thin wrist and hand locking him in place. He pressed hard against Pitch’s bones with blunt fingertips, forcing the chokehold of a grip to loosen until he could drag the other into another hard kiss. He wouldn’t go and lose this for himself when it had barely started to exist to begin with- but he wasn’t going to dance around at the end of a string either. Teeth met his already parted lips, pulling at the slightly dry skin in something that was more of a bite than a nip and sent a wicked twist of heat through his gut before the same teeth clicked against his own with a dull ache. 

He dragged and twisted his fingers through the neatly styled strands of Pitch’s hair to match the ones still pressed, now more forgivingly, to the back of his head. It kept him bent in close as let his tongue scrape along the line of the other’s bottom teeth before dragging teasingly across the ridges on the roof of his mouth. He had probably kissed more people since he’d come to Berlin than anywhere else- but that didn’t make them all equal. There was no contest between something that felt like a mechanical element in a factory line job and something fast, taut, almost violent. He bit down, just slightly over the line of as hard as he probably should, on the tongue running tauntingly, daringly across his own. The chuckle of a groan that filled Pitch’s throat was more than enough to tell him he’d played that card right.

“Mhh…-“ The sound was lazy and Pitch chased it with the fingers still under the younger man’s shirt following the curve of his ribcage to his narrow chest. His slicked lips curled up into a thin smirk as he narrowed his eyes at his companion almost contemplatively. Jack’s fingers twisted harder in his hair- breaths a step out of time. “I don’t care how this happens-“ he exhaled, pressing his hand flat against the other’s sternum. The knee between his legs was as determinedly present as before and he could hazard a guess at which version of how this night would play out Jack had gotten into his head. The twist on his features deepened as he arched his hips forward just far enough to press against it- the younger man above him biting down on his cheek as he did. “But if you don’t make it worth my time I can guarantee I won’t be boring myself and bothering to entertain your whims again.”

“Then how about-“ Jack took advantage of the lazy set of Pitch’s shoulders to aggressively tug his head to the side, baring his neck with ease. Instead of protests all he got was a look through half-lidded gold eyes as he traced the subtle lines of tendons and muscles there with short, heated nips. “You pipe down for once and let me get on with that?” The second part of the statement was issued as a heated breath against the ear beneath his lips before scraping his teeth across the sensitive skin there as well. “I don’t suppose you have a bed to go along with the rest of these fine furnishings?” Pitch tipped his head a little further in to the light haired man’s demanding hold, snaking the tip of his tongue across the blue, blue veins that were staunchly visible under the thin skin of his wrist.

“For once-“ He finally relinquished his grip on Jack’s hair in favor of clasping his narrow hips in both hands, thumbs digging in to the sensitive junction where his thighs met his hips. “You happen to be in luck.” Resisting the urge to squirm at how Pitch was _just_ avoiding the heat beginning to build between his legs, he reached down to grasp at his elbows. As easily as he had pushed forward he slid back, hauling the taller man to his feet with him and forcing him to let him go all over again.

“Then you’d better lead the way,” Jack stated- he sounded out of breath and he didn’t give a damn. “Great as I think it would be to see you try and bend like that at your age, I’m just not in the mood for the acrobatics that chair would take.”

“Hilarious-“ Pitch stated, voice clipped but their arms brushed with far more substance than before as he brushed past him into the hall. He followed with curt steps- this time around the wall mounted lights and the right color to name the shade of paper that covered the narrow passage seemed both less engaging and far less important. His hand wandered across the wall by the doorframe instinctively as they stepped into the bedroom that was lit uncharitably by only the gap in the curtains and the gas lamp a story below. 

“Ah, ah-“ the breathy reprimand from the dark in front of him stilled Jack’s hand before he could find any sort of surface and hopefully a lamp set on it. “No lights. My home, my rules.” 

His vision lacked any sense of detail but he could still make out the slightly darker shadow of Pitch’s narrow frame shrugging off the fitted jacket that had remained on since the club. He tossed it over the board at the foot of the bed without ceremony, crooking a slim finger to call Jack away from the door and further into the room. With a subtle scoff he obeyed. In the lack of light he curled a hand around one of the bedposts, swinging to perch on the edge of the mattress long enough to kick his shoes off as he climbed onto the frame properly.

“I’m starting to think,” the younger man breathed as the coiled metal somewhere underneath them let out a creak in response to Pitch’s weight joining his own on the sheets. “You might have a bit of thing for the world after dark.” A stretched thin chuckle and a warm breath against the skin of his neck not covered by the collar of his shirt was all the warning he gave the other as he pushed Jack down against duvet, head by the sparse pillows.

“How astute.” The night didn’t have the same insistent demand for clarity that he did not possess that the day did. Yes, he supposed he might have developed a fondness for it the past years. Another humorless laugh dried up in his throat as the smaller man batted away the fingers delicately tracing out his Adam’s apple and the pulse thrumming somewhere in those muscles. He sat up with his own puff of air fingers blindly but deftly finding tidy knot done in the tie above the hollow of his throat. His blunt nails freed it of itself with a few short tugs- the strip of dark cloth slithering out from under Pitch’s collar as he snuck an arm around his narrow waist, pulling him down into another bruising kiss. This time it was him biting indelicately at the dark haired man’s lip, splitting the once more dry skin enough to taste something metallic on his tongue as he ran it over the cut in shallow apology. An unwanted one if the hard scrape of teeth against the slick muscle was anything to go by.

“You know me…” Jack state with a rush of breath as he slipped the first few buttons on Pitch’s shirt out of their holes, leaving him able to press an open lipped kiss to the hollowed point at the base of his neck. “Quick on the uptake… and all that…” His skin was prickling with hypersensitivity- body far too aware of the weight of the other straddling one of his legs. The dull ache that welled up in his groin dragged a partially stifled groan out of him as he continued to tug at the small buttons under his fingertips- each attempt to get more undone made a little less successful by the near darkness. The feeling of hands dragging up his thighs sent another shudder rolling down his spine as he finally pushed the fabric free of the taller man’s shoulders, letting it catch and bunch at the bend of his elbows. His vest loosened around him as it was undone- leaving him to shrug it off with the same lack of ceremony Pitch had had when concerning himself with his jacket. He made a halfhearted attempt to push it out of the way, far more focused on trailing his hands down the expanse of skin he had freed for himself.

“Hmm-“ the slight hum escaped through narrow gap between Pitch’s lips along with a quicker inhale as he felt fingernails trail inward along his ribcage and down across his stomach, tapping above the waistband of his pants. He made far quicker work of Jack’s shirt than the other had managed- inwardly rolling his eyes at the suspenders he had to slip off his shoulders to discard the garment. Of course he would. His back curved slightly into the sudden feeling of lips and teeth leaving a mark at his collarbone, one of the hands that had been on his stomach now scratching down the back of his neck. He bent back into the firm contact instinctively, eyes narrowing at the laugh that fluttered out of Jack as he did so. Even in the lack of light he could see the other’s wry grin stretched easily across his features.

“Should have guessed you’d like things rougher,” he muttered, tone utterly unsurprised as his hands ghosted down the older man’s back and ass. They came to rest on his slim thighs as he ran his lips dryly across one of his nipples and then it’s twin- another chuckle leaving him as he pressed a hard kiss to the center of his chest. The sound twisted into a whining keen as Pitch sank his teeth unapologetically into the nape of his neck. He didn’t need to see to know that it would bruise. “ _Jesus_ -“

“You were saying-?” Pitch drawled breathily as fingers pinched at the skin of his hips- sending a welcome twist through his gut.

“I was saying-“ Jack ran the flat of his tongue across one of the other’s nipples again, forcing himself to pause momentarily. “You didn’t need to take- a damn chunk out of m- anhh- shit—“ The last word was lost to another sharp groan as Pitch pressed the flat of his palm to his half hard cock through his pants. He bit his cheek roughly silencing another noise as the hand there pressed forward again, sending a jolt up his spine. Son of a bitch. Another thin laugh drifted to him from the inches that separated them as Pitch’s thin fingers pressed against his bare chest, forcing him back flat against the sheets again.

“Enlighten me…” he exhaled, deftly tugging the younger man’s pants down his thighs, depending on the way he kicked at them to get rid of them entirely. He ran a knuckle across the waistband of the other’s underwear, getting a slight squirm for it. “How many people have you been with, Jack?”  
“You’re not my first- if that’s what you’re looking for…” He rolled his eyes slightly, fingers twisting in the sheets under them as he propped himself up on his elbows. The smile above him was cutting and barely visible. 

“But were they men or boys?” Pitch pressed his lips shortly above the other’s bellybutton before slipping back along the sheets slightly. The hand still pressed against Jack’s stomach stopped him from sitting up and following the movement as he tried to do.

“What does-“ The rest of the question was lost in a low gasp at the sensation of lips and tongue slipping up the inside of his thigh. In his prone position and with the dark around them he could only half make out the older man kneeling between his legs. Same lack of sight only made the painfully light contact feel that much sharper though. A thumb ran up his other leg in steady circles. The point of warmth was quickly forgotten about though as Pitch let out a slow breath against the base of his cock and balls- the heat obvious even through the fabric of his underwear. His toes curled sharply, brow knitting as he clutched a little harder at the sheets. Even if thinking in a straight line suddenly seemed a little harder he could take a wild guess at where this was headed. 

“Mnhh…” Jack bit his lip against the noise as Pitch tugged his underwear down past his faintly bent knees. It was followed quickly by the other nipping firmly at the subtle curve of his hipbones. He arched his back blindly into the teasing contact; half hoping it would push the other man into doing more. Another hissing laugh reached his ears.

“Simply curious…” Pitch drawled, the heel of his palm digging sharply into the light haired mans lean stomach to pin him tightly in place as he finally curled two fingers around the head of his cock. Jack’s hips jerked sharply up against the hold keeping them down, trying to shake it off at the quick jolt heat that shot through him at the sudden touch. His lips parted faintly as other fingers joined the first two, squeezing in a quick jerk.

“Chr-ist-“ He sacrificed his hold on the sheets with one hand in favor of running it through Pitch’s hair, gripping at the back of his head when he pressed another open mouthed kiss to skin dangerously close to his balls. He closed his eyes, reopening them just as quickly in indecision as he tried to make out the sight of the dark haired man’s head between his legs. His muscles felt like they had locked with tension. 

“Are you going-“ Jack swallowed through the words at another quick stroke to his cock. “To do anything besides- slowly kill me down there?”

“Mm-“ Without warning Pitch dipped the tip down tongue down against the slit of the other’s dick, getting a full on shudder from the man underneath him as he tipped his head back against one of the pillows with a low moan. “Ask _nicely_ for once.” He replaced his tongue with his thumb, dragging the digit back and forth across his leaking head.

“You-“ Jack’s fingers twisted a little further in the strands of hair he was still gripping, lips parted and a quip of a protest half formed on his tongue. The thought was derailed as knuckles brushed firmly along the base of his cock, pressing just hard enough to make themselves known. “Anhh- Alright-! Please, _please_ -‘” 

Anything to take the edge off would have been find but- His throat ran dry with a shallow gasp of a moan as Pitch’s lips slid around the head of his dick with a wet heat. There were hands on both his hips now, locking him in place, but that didn’t his back from arching off the mattress. Pitch swallowed slickly around him as he took him further into his mouth, leaving him lightheaded. Oh Christ, this was new and it was _good_ -

“Mmnn-“ The dark haired man let out a wordless hum around the other’s length as he felt him twist in his tight grip again, trying to rock up further into his mouth as his hands pushed at his head from behind the whole time. Instead of yielding, he simply scraped his bottom teeth faintly across the sensitive skin of Jack’s cock in warning- keeping him still enough as he bobbed down against the stiff organ. His gold eyes flicked up long enough to half take in the sight of the other biting into the corner of one of the pillows to stay quiet, brow tightly knit.

“Unhh- Fuu-ck“ The pillow didn’t mute everything though- nor did the glance he earned go unnoticed. Jack let half a smirk to himself spread his lips as he slipped one of his feet between the other’s legs, pressing hard against the erection in his pants and earning an almost startled groan that shot through his length in a pleasant buzz. He rolled his hips up again, this time managing to rock further into Pitch’s mouth, his tongue running hot and slick against the underside of his own erection. 

Mnhh- God, he hadn’t taken the other for the sort to do this and shit- shit, it was nice. He felt his throat tense and then relax against the head of his cock as it brushed against the sensitive muscles- the heels of his feet digging into the covers as he tried to give himself some kind of purchase, still fucking the older man’s mouth in shallow thrusts. Pitch’s cheeks hollowed around him as he sucked, cupping and rolling his balls in his palm. Jack’s tightly shut eye opened once more though as, just as quickly as he’d taken him into his mouth, the dark haired man pulled back with a subtle pop. He laughed at the disappointed keen that followed, unable to sit up with the hands still tight in his hair.

“Oh… did you want this over so soon?” he exhaled, smirk locking his lips into a twist as he let his gaze run over what of Jack was visible to him- all lean limbs stretched out and chest rising and falling in shallow breaths. For once, he felt perfectly in control in the other’s presence. A second skipped by and then there was an impish grin meeting his upturned lips as Jack slipped his legs between his own once more. He sat up, pulling Pitch into him and over his lap with the fingers snared in his longer hair.

“I guess-“ he hummed in an undertone, laying a nip of a kiss to the tip of the other’s nose and then his lips as he pushed his pants down and out the way eagerly. “You might have a point.” He returned the favor, cupping the dark haired man’s hard member in his palm as he pressed a couple of his free fingers to his lips in place of his mouth. Pitch arched a brow silently, unresponsive to the gentle pressure as he rolled his hips against Jack’s other palm- a slightly heavier breath slipping from between his teeth as he did so.

“You said…” Jack crooned, catching his earlobe between his teeth as he dropped the hand on the older man’s dick back down to his side. “That you didn’t care how this worked out if I remember right.”

“I also said,” Pitch breathed, running his tongue along the first of the other’s pale finger joints in a taunt. “Make it worth my time. I would so hate to be _disappointed_.” He flashed Jack something that could have been a sneer as he took the offered digits between his lips, twisting his tongue around them. The light haired man swallowed back a groan at the heat that so neatly mimicked the feeling of the other’s mouth around his erection. His lips parted a little as he rolled his hips forward, cocks pressing together with a delicious kind of friction, in response to continued assault around his fingers. With the same muted pop from before the man straddling his lap let them go. “Go on,” he stated lowly against the shell of the younger man’s ear like it was a challenge. “Make my night.”

Jack’s only response was a brief, clear laugh as he pulled Pitch into another heady, open-mouthed kiss. His fingers trailed down his tailbone to the curve of his ass, leaving a cool trail in their wake as he pressed a finger teasingly to the tight ring of muscle they stopped at. A quick, impatient bite of his tongue spurred him on as he pushed slowly into the other- earning a shudder he almost missed in the dark of the room. Pitch leaned back out of the kiss to draw in a silent breath; sucking roughly instead at the pulse point in Jack’s neck as he curled his finger slightly inside the other’s hot passage.

Another dry swallow stuck in Jack’s throat as he pushed the second finger into Pitch, spreading and scissoring them almost impatiently. God- No, he wasn’t jumping into this without any previous experience but he wasn’t sure he had ever really _wanted_ someone like this before. Especially when he’d be damned if he had a clear reason for it. There were nails biting into his wait and shoulder where Pitch’s hands had settled as his fingers sank deeper into the older man- searching and spreading until-

“ _Better_ -“ The clipped word came with a short intake of breath against his already marked neck as he brushed against the other’s prostate.

“Didn’t I tell you-“ Jack stated through his teeth as Pitch rolled his hips forward slightly, their aching cocks brushing again. “I’m not nearly as new to this- as you would like-?” He pressed against the bundle of nerves again, harder this, getting another clench from the muscles around his fingers. The words were clear, if oddly punctuated by breaths that betrayed how fucking badly his erection ached at this point.

“Mnhh-“ The dark haired man shifted his weight on his knees; to press back harder into the short, pleasurable sparks crawling up his spine. “As if I give a half a damn about what you get up to…” Their position left him unable to grab at his companion’s wrist and still the boyish fingers still fucking into and stretching him. Instead, he dragged his own slight nails sharply up across Jack’s shoulder, leaving angry red streaks on the pale skin there in their wake. “ _Enough_ —“ He wasn’t asking to be coddled and comforted. If this _child_ had the audacity to sleep with him then it would be on his terms and he wanted an ache to go alongside the pleasure. After a moment, Jack obeyed, withdrawing from the other man as he pressed his lips shortly to the rounded curve of his shoulder. Pitch reached down between them, smearing the precum there along the length of the smaller man’s dick. He couldn’t be bothered with the idea of proper lubricant right now. 

“Hmnn-“ Jack ran his tongue across his own lower lip at the loose grip, shifting underneath the other to line the head of his flushed cock up his hole- scraping a thumb nail across one of his hardened nipples as he did so. “Uh- anhh-“ The sound turned into a breathless grunt as he rocked his hips up to push slowly into the tight right of muscle. In the lack of light above him, Pitch’s lips parted minutely and silent.

He spread his knees a notch further on either side of the other’s hips, grabbing at the short hairs at the back of Jack’s head once more in response to the hands holding firmly to his waist. His breath snared unevenly as the other rocked his hips demandingly up into him, filling him further. His nails bit into the shorter man’s scalp in warning- lips half parted as he met the next shallow thrust with a roll of his own hips. Gaze fixed on a point on the wall over the narrow pale shoulder before him; Pitch’s brow knit faintly, another half groan lodged in his throat that he refused to vocalize until the other damn well earned it.

“Do you even-“ the words were breathless on Jacks, lips as he pressed his fingers firmly into the lean muscles under Pitch’s shoulder blades, jerking up into him in short, untimed thrust that got him equally as un-rhythmic clenches from the other’s tight walls. Mnhh- shit- that was- He swallowed thickly, one hand dropping to the taller man’s ass as he stilled briefly, the tip of his tongue tracing out the sharp turn of his collarbone. “Even… bother to fool around with other people-?” Fuck- the tight heat around him sure didn’t feel like it. Every inch of Pitch was long limbs and the stark angles of narrow joints he could have lost himself in if he thought he would have let him. Instead, he bit his cheek as his head was jerked back, their eyes meeting in the graduated black between them.

“Why-?” Pitch questioned thinly between his teeth, knees pressing hard into the mattress beneath them. He rose up a couple inches before pushing back down, all agonizing slowness as he fucked himself on the younger man inside him. “Would it… trouble your sleep- if I did?” Their hips bumped slightly as he twisted the light hairs between his fingers- forcing the other man’s hips into stillness as he kept the pace of their fucking at something aching.

“Mnhh-“ Jack’s lips twisted slightly, even as they remained parted. The clench of the older man’s muscles around his length was practically a fucking burn. “ _God_ —n-no… not especially-“ If he was honest with himself he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t even considered Pitch being with _him_ a real possibility. It was still surreal. How could he go and be jealous of _impossibilities_? His grip on the older man’s ass tightened a little as he pulled his hips in closer, free hand slipping between them to blindly palm his cock, thumb and forefinger wrapping around his flushed head. “And I swear- if you do- anhh- don’t fucking _move_ -” Every one of his attempts to speed up the pace only earned him another painful yank of his cropped hair.

“You’ll do what exactly, Jack…?” Pitch’s voice crooned against his ear, aggravatingly composed compared to his own. The questioned was laced with a taunting bite and tug of teeth to his earlobe, sending something like spider-silk of a shiver through his spine. God, that was foreign. His memory scrabbled for the last time he had heard his name in bed- out of limited times he had decided to hit the sack with someone. Pitch arched into the hand wrapped around his cock, breathing deep and controlled as he felt the other twitch inside him. Without warning the pressure of the other’s smaller hands jumped to his shoulders, pushing him back sharply against the sheets. His head hit dangerously close to the footboard- the creak of the bedsprings seemingly only muted further by the darkness.

“Do you _ever_ -“ the question halted midway through as Jack pinned one of Pitch’s starkly defined hipbones down under the heel of his palm- his other hand snagged in the other’s hair, forcing his back to arch as he bent over him. “Lay _off_ -?” 

The metal springs under him dug into his knees as the slender legs on either side of him spread wider with their new position, his ass half balanced in his lap. He thrust roughly down into the other, moaning lowly again at the dragging clench of the friction and the fact he was finally able to set the pace his body was fucking _aching_ for. Pitch simply curved his neck back into the hand keeping him locked in place like some immature pin through a butterfly behind glass. A laugh ran out across his tongue as he met the smaller man’s rutting pace, forcing his length deeper. The quick end he had brought to his attempts to stretch him earlier turned each push into his body into a cutting ache. There was an invisible tremble in his ankles that curled his toes at each delicately balanced jolt of pain and pleasure.

“Anhh… _Yes_ —“ He didn’t bother to bite back the sharp gasp as Jack finally tipped his hips forward just enough to push up against his prostate. He clenched sharply around his erection- a wavering groan in the others voice filling the room. The hand at his hip dragged across his stomach, wrapping around cock in a few jerky strokes before smearing precum up his chest slightly to pinch at his nipples. “ _Again_ \- Mnnh…” 

This time Jack wordlessly obeyed the breathless order, briefly pressing his forehead against one of the taller man’s knees as he slammed up into the bundle of nerves again. His own legs were stiff and taut under him and the tight tangle of heat in his groin- their pace settling into something fast and bruising that bunched the sheets under Pitch’s carefully splayed out form. Even like this, neck and teeth bared and breaths turned into hollow pants, there was something restrained about him.

“Fu- P-Pitch—Shit, anhh, shit—“ He would be damned if he finished first and had to deal with the older man’s gloating for it. But fuck- this was hot and good and- He was far, far closer than he wanted to be. A knee pressed into the small of his back, keeping him in closer still as his hips slapped up against the other’s ass. The sound was sharply obscene, even in the lack of silence. The feeling of thin fingers wrapping around his wrist and pulling at the hand still resting on Pitch’s chest pushed through the haze of heat and pleasure slightly. His tongue felt thick in his mouth as their guiding presence stopped his slackened grip at the taller man’s slender throat. A dipping, oxygen starved laugh pressed against his ears as he ran his thumb unsurely down the windpipe beneath the pads of his fingers, his jerking thrusts not slowing as he chased to knot of white heat starting to form in his groin.

“ _Scared_ -?” Jack’s shoulders hunched slightly at the all but whispered word that still seemed to reach his bones, his hand remaining slack of the exposed skin. If Pitch was looking at him he couldn’t tell and wasn’t about to look- his own attention locked in morbid fascination on the fingernails now digging violently and demanding into the flesh near his veins. His head spun slightly in a manner that wasn’t entirely unpleasant at the pricks of pain. The taunt came again, pushing past their labored breathing and the soft slap of skin on skin. “Scared to give me what I want--? … Such a _child_ …”

“You’re a sick son of a bitch- y’know that?” The reply was raspy. Like a vice, Jack’s grip tightened at the taunt or at the behest of some formerly unacknowledged instinct, squeezing with bruising force. His hips twitched out of time as felt the older man choke on his next attempted inhale under his palm. He bent in on himself slightly, eyes shut tight and brow knit as he felt whatever pattern they had established earlier slip away from him rapidly- trusts desperate and searching.

Pitch kicked out blindly with one leg, his own eyelids fluttering like they had a heartbeat of their own as a starved burning began to fill his lungs. His spine arched further, pressing his hips in as close to Jack’s cock as he could manage. _Oh_ \- He hadn’t thought the man above him would have the guts and guile when it really counted but there was no way he couldn’t feel the way his pulse was screaming for air in his blood. And he just kept gripping _tighter_ ; leaving dull, blooming pains that would be bruises come morning. There were black spots spreading into lack of light that already yawned above him. His muscles were bowstring tight as, with something slurred and airless that might have been a name on his lips, his orgasm hit him. 

Disconnectedly, he heard Jack gasp above him like he had been the one trapped in a chokehold. The younger man’s forehead was once again pressed to his bent knee, the quick thrusts into his body forcing him to ride out the aftershocks of his climax as the other’s own washed over him. The blind, artificial night that had begun to fill his irises vanished as quickly as it had come with the fresh air that filled his chest.

“Mnhh…” Jack let his head roll back against his still hunched shoulders as the tension left in the wake of the pleasure drained from his body, his cock softening slowly inside Pitch. He ran his tongue across his lips, finding them drier than he had expected he ran the hand still lying on the dark haired man’s neck down the smooth curve of one of his shoulders. Reality crept back in fast and he attempted to slow the shift of contact, attempted to act as though the former violence in his own hold didn’t leave him feeling as though he’d pressed his hand to a hot stove. 

“… Damn…” He didn’t let himself linger on it as he pulled out of the man beneath him, feeling Pitch’s now hypersensitive body tense briefly around his dick as he went. He leaned in, finding the other’s own dry lips again in a far more relaxed if still somehow urgent kiss. For a moment he could have sworn there was the same desperate, drowning, lonely something that was always somewhere to be found in his marrow mirrored on Pitch’s tongue. Fingers pressed firmly against his temple, hurrying the thought away and pushing at him until he finally consented and slid back off the older man’s lithe form.

“If you insist on staying the night,” Pitch pushed himself easily into a sitting position- grimacing briefly at the pang that shot through his lower back. Brat. His throat still felt hoarse and sore but there was no trace of it to be found in his voice. “Then kindly do me a favor and stay on your own side of the bed.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just want to thank you all for the kudos and the mind-blowingly wonderful comments. help. i have no idea what i'm supposed to do with all of these feelingssss

“… Deep and crisp and even...” The tune hovered like a radio broadcasting without static as Pitch cracked his eyes open against the grey light pressing into the room. It left details of the room, invisible at night when not looked for, laid bare. His eyes skimmed over his bedside table and desk. Each morning was a cycle. For an ungainly minute he was a stranger in the space he paid for. The signs of life around him were an elaborate hoax that didn’t belong to his own doing. The books, the ashtray… Seconds would snare in him like physical things, everything but the facts in front of him trying to tell him he was still a nameless slot in a nurse’s round. 

The ache still wrapped around the base of his spine grounded him more readily than other mornings. His attention slid to his pants and shirt that had slipped to the floor at some point, the jacket across the footboard still standing out starkly. It looked like a shred of something a reality removed now, all black against the morning making itself known. With something that would have looked like caution in anyone else he glanced at the empty space beside him. Jack’s clothes were gone and the sheets were wrinkled as though it had been a remarkably still ghost who had drifted off beside him. 

“Brightly shone the moon that night…” The unguided melody wandered through the apartment to him again. Maybe the ghost had left his chambers but it hadn’t fled his life. A sigh snaked out of his lips as he stood, reaching for the dressing gown draped across the chair in front of his sparsely covered desk. It was more of a habitual formality, he supposed. There was little work to actually be done at it. He cinched the tie deftly around his waist, hand slipping into the right pocket there to tug free a book of matches and a half empty box of cigarettes to match the ones clipped inside his case. Disinterestedly, the dark haired man kicked away the grey shirt on the floorboards. Everything would have to re-ironed and pressed then. He wandered into the hall, striking one of the matches into its brief life as he went.

“Though the frost… was cruel…” Jack let the lyrics slowly die on his lips as he glanced up at the sound of footsteps approaching the open doorway to the kitchen. He had pulled back the curtains in front of the windows, letting the winter sunlight pour into the space properly. Unlike the other rooms he had been guided through, the walls were light, expanding the room past what it really was. A lazy grin seized his features with the other’s gold eyes on him.

“Carols? Really?” Pitch remained in the doorway, feet just short of stepping on to the tiled floor. In the space across from him the younger man was neatly framed by the first third of the now exposed window. His feet dangled a few inches short of touching down from the counter he sat on, features partially silhouetted by the strained beams sneaking in through the glass. There was a book that had to have been one of his open and balanced on Jack’s knees and a cup of something clutched in his left hand. His disingenuous invitation for his… guest to ‘make himself at home’ last night had evidently carried over without his knowledge. Lit from behind, with the white light reflecting off the after-dark snowfall, Jack looked all but brittle and almost fey.

“’Tis the season…” One of Jack’s brows arched as he let his head lean back against the cabinet on the wall behind him. “Though I’m starting to forget it is, being in here.” It must have been the only apartment in the entire sprawl of Berlin with walls barren of some kind of decoration. He knew his own gaze must have looked far more morning weary than Pitch’s. There was already something sharp in those irises- something that probably never left properly, even when rest came around. This was, he realized with some dulled down version of surprise, the first time he had ever seen Pitch in daylight- not candles, or the slowly dying filaments of bulbs. Or as a shade of black in an already black room, his recollections of last night prodded. Pitch looked like a knife wound in the air, the bottom hem of his dressing gown shifting in an unfelt draught. Smoke curled out of his lips and dissipated slowly near the high ceiling. With the same beckoning air that had been used on him, the light haired man crooked a finger- a silent attempt to bring the other into the room.

“I don’t celebrate,” Pitch stated simply, feet silent on the tiles as he stepped forward to the sink beside Jack, knocking ash off into the metal basin.

“Not at all?” the look flashed his way was skeptical as the other took a sip of what he could see now was tea. Wonderful, he’d gone rummaging through his cabinets too. Jack pursed his lips around the rim of the mug he had found. The older man didn’t look tired- deep-set eyes still courting their shadows, lips still haughty. He looked drawn. The fading yellow light pulled across a waning moon. He looked like a person carrying something just out of sight under every inch of their skin. There was a scab on his lip where he had bitten it, a paper-cut of a line contrasting with the filter of his cigarette.

“No,” the word was blunted as Pitch stared down at the courtyard spread below them. The morning would be muted if he bothered to venture outside. The city always was after a heavy snowfall. “I expected you to be gone. Or are you as unemployed as you look?” He could make out the looping trails of embroidery now that followed the bottom hem and neckline of the vest Jack had absentmindedly slipped back on over his shoulders. There was something eastern European about the winding trails of thread.

“You’re the one who slept with me,” the younger man scoffed. “If I look that scruffy…” He trailed off for a moment, running a thumb across the pages of the book still sitting in his lap. He’d been right... that they were all stories filled with plenty of questions and only the most hard-won answers. “But naw, I don’t work… Who wants to hire the kid with less than perfect papers? The guy renting me a room is pretty lenient and there’s a woman, American too. She slips me a couple Marks if I watch her kids when she’s out- I think she’s just thrilled someone else speaks fluent English.”

“Fascinating,” Pitch muttered, knocking another exhausted clump of ashes down into the sink by the drain.

“You asked,” Jack shot back curtly, taking in the other properly for the first time since he’d stepped in closer. The low robe didn’t hide any trace elements he had managed to leave on the other. There were fingerprint bruises on Pitch’s neck. They stood out like angry burns on the lithe muscles when he swallowed. Something, not quite a frown, pulled at the corners of his upturned lip. With his sight returned to him the traces of violence left behind on the other’s skin were almost too vivid, too honest. He bit at the inside of his cheek, reaching out before he could catch himself- though his fingers made no contact, hovering tentatively over the purple blemishes instead. Lovers, he supposed, woke up in the morning and kissed again. Those weren’t the kind of streets he lost himself in come sundown.

“Did your handiwork slip your mind that quickly?” Pitch’s eye slid from the fingers a hairsbreadth away from his skin to lock with Jack’s own, his stare hard. He exhaled again; smoke coursing over his lip, a phantom river that trailed away into nothing. His own bone laced hand slipped between Jack’s and his skin, knocking away the would-be touch. The younger man let his arm fall back to his side without protest. “I didn’t let you stay the night so your guilt would have a chance to kiss everything better in the morning. I don’t have a use for hand-holding.”

“I don’t…” Jack hid the knit in his brow as he took another sip of the drink he had made himself. It had been on a whim and to fill the time until the older man woke up- but he hadn’t been thrown out on his ass for it yet. What had he expected sliding out of that booth in the club? He hadn’t _expected_ \- that was the problem. He’d fallen into and followed the thrum of eager, nervous energy that had sunk its claws into him. Here he was, after the fact, trying to decide what he’d hoped for hours ago. Pitch was _fascinating_ \- he could have spent the rest of his time and energy trying to force all the uneven shards the other man had given him into a complete picture. People preached trust though. Pitch called him a child but he didn’t naively go around seeing trust where there was none. Maybe their execution was different, but he got the feeling they were two men with very little faith in anything. Out of sheer necessity if nothing else. “I don’t either, really…” It was honest but came out like a sigh.

“Then why haven’t you left yet?” It was a cold challenge that dragged a laugh, unbidden, out of Jack as he set the borrowed book between them. He reached up to pull the unbuttoned collar of his shirt away from his skin, making the red on pale marks easily visible.

“Maybe because I look a little like the victim of a hit and run committed by a very rushed cabbie?” he short back dryly. Where the older man had full on bitten him was plain as day. Maybe, came the flutter of an afterthought, because he had wanted to see if Pitch let any vulnerability come knocking in the early hours. “I’m trying to preserve your honor here. Lend me a coat so I can cover up properly.”

“Mhh-“ The dark haired man dropped the filter of his cigarette into the sink where it could be left to safely burn itself down to nothing. The title of the book Jack had pulled from his shelves was bold on the front cover. The English rendition of the Brothers Grimm's fastidiously collected tales. “Devil’s bargains?” It was consent without being an answer.

“And fathers who consume their children,” Jack supplied with a slim smile, jumping down from the counter with ease as he set his mug away in disinterested abandonment. He rolled on to the balls of his feet briefly, every inch of him airy. “Nightmare men who ride when the moon is dead.” His fingers danced in the air before him- a mockery of throwing shadow puppets on to the wall to accompany bedtime stories.

“Tall tales to keep children in line,” Pitch muttered, gesturing that the other should follow him out of the kitchen once more. The foolish, complacent, neglectful father who deserved none of the love his children gave him… If he cracked that book open along its spine, inevitably he wasted minutes, hours staring at the stories where that theme played out. As if dead academics from centuries ago had something to bend down and whisper in his ear in explanation.

“ _I_ didn’t spend the on money them,” the light haired man pointed out as they trailed down the hall to the coatrack by the front door. Another detail he hadn’t bothered to take in, in the rush of finally seeing the world the other called his own. Another hum of vague acknowledgement drifted to him as he accepted the coat Pitch passed him. He didn’t bother to notice or care most of the time but it was hard to ignore the fact that the garment was more finely made than any of his own. The shoulders fit fine, but he had to bite back a chuckle at the way the cuffs slipped past his wrists to his palms. “And how am I supposed to get this back to you?” 

The question dangled and hung itself delicately in the inches between them as Pitch glanced at him, all pursed thin lips. This had been meant as an exorcism- an extraction of Jack’s impish presence from his life. Give him what he was blatantly, boldly chasing after, bore him into submission, and send him on his way. A trinket turned over in his hands but decidedly left not purchased. He reached up, unconsciously running his thumb across one of the bruises on his neck. A dull ache prickled out from it. Whether it was desperation or anger born, the other had a vein of untapped violence in him. He had a use and he’d given him a choice between closing his door or leaving it cracked enough to let the devils come crawling back in.

“I’m sure we’ll be running into each other again,” he stated boredly, ignoring the obvious delight in the way the younger man’s lips twisted with practiced ease. He was like the overdone acting in a flickering film reel. “Return it to me then. And do us both a favor and bring your own.”

“Sure, sure,” Jack drawled with little intention to follow through on the words as he flashed the other three raised fingers. “Scouts honor and all that. I-“ The words were cut off by a knock that threw him in how soft it was. Pitch threw the door an unreadable glance, his thumbs hooked neatly over the hem of his robe’s pockets. The knock came again after a brief bit absolute silence on either side of the painted wood. “You want to get that?”

“Not especially,” the older man muttered through his teeth with something that could almost have been a roll of his eyes. He brushed past Jack, not bothering to pull up the thin fabric that had slid further down his shoulder and left him a picture of purposeful disarray. “Sanderson,” the name was on his lips even before the door was enough to reveal the man standing on his doorstep. There was only one person who came around banging on his door as it was- he didn’t need to see his face to know. “Can I be of some assistance?” Behind him, Jack shifted slightly in an attempt to get a glimpse of the newcomer. He leaned around Pitch, making them visible to each other in the process. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting out of the man he assumed was the neighbor who ‘liked his rest’ but it wasn’t the face he was looking at. 

Sanderson looked very much like a man who had just woken up. Unlike Pitch, sleep was obvious in his almost half-lidded eyes, blond hair tousled and his own dressing gown cinched tightly around his waist. If Toothiana was a study in contrasts in the way she dressed herself for her nights, then these two were a study in absolute opposites in every other matter. Next to the other’s grounded, almost square form, Pitch looked even more like a wraith woken up at the wrong hour. Jack pressed his knuckles briefly to his lips, holding back a laugh at the way Sanderson had his arms folded over his chest. The hard look he was peering up at Pitch with was scolding without words. 

The slight movement drew the blonde’s attention to him as his gaze shifted to Jack’s face and then away again before double taking almost violently. His arms dropped away from his chest as he raised a finger, eyes flicking between the faces of the two men standing before him. There wasn’t room for much inquiry or question when the dark haired man had made no attempt to burry what had happened last night in the back of the closest or under the bed. Sanderson’s lips parted slightly as if trying to summon the right words from somewhere in the back of his throat.

“Spare yourself the effort,” Pitch cut across him, leaning against the doorframe to support his weight with his shoulder. The movement left them all with a clear line of sight to each other should they choose to make use of it. Jack felt his lips settle into some habitual form a sheepish smile at the still parted lips and borderline flabbergasted arch of a brow they were receiving. But he had wanted that, hadn’t he? He had wandered into Berlin’s glittering underworld, which was no underworld at all, turning the idea of what it would be like to kiss someone who didn’t scuttle off at the first sound of footsteps over and over again in his mind. He had wanted pride. There was hubris and then some in every lithe inch of Pitch’s relaxed form. The kind of hubris people drowned themselves in and fell from grace over. It was the lure of a lantern in the middle of a storm. 

“Frost- Sanderson Mansnoozie, my neighbor and a reoccurring source of irritation in my life,” the introduction was punctuated with a loose hand gesture and met with an obvious roll of the blonde’s eyes. “Sanderson- Jack Frost, he was just leaving.” Jack had taken half a step forward with the intention of shaking the other’s hand. He paused though, shooting Pitch an arched brow as he did.

“Am I?” he questioned with a scoff. “No one mentioned it to me.”

“Which is a shame,” the older man shot back without missing a beat. “But yes, I’m afraid you are.” There was no need, as far as he was concerned, to draw this moment out. His eyes remained locked with the other’s pale ones before slouching consent snuck into the set of Jack’s shoulders and he shrugged under the heavy clothe of the outerwear. He wasn’t sure he felt like pushing and pulling at his luck any more than he already had in the span of less than an hour. He was wearing a ticket back in- a nod in a side street to walk on, walk on.

“I guess I’m leaving,” the words came with a sigh and another jaunty shrug as he offered out a hand to Sanderson properly this time. The shake he got was as miffed as was the look still fixed on the blonde’s face. “Good to meet you, Sandy.” He twisted into the hall- stepping out of the apartment felt like leaving a world removed behind, the same as leaving any club or alley based bar. The thought didn’t linger though as he offered both men a short, two fingered salute off his brow, making for the twisting curve of the staircase. Pitch watched as he descended out of their line of sight with level, thin lips before gesturing the blond inside. He latched the door once more as soon as he was through.

“You…” Sanderson’s voice was raspy and heavy with disuse that settled in after days after a lack of conversation. It had been days, he supposed- but time was a foggy, flexible thing in his walls next door. It was met with a hand held up to silence him once more before he’d even properly begun.

“ _Please_ ,” Pitch shot him a scathing sneer over his shoulder as they crossed into his sitting room. The aftermath of the night lingered on in the two half full glasses on the end table, the unceremonious draping of his coat, the yawning little gap in his bookshelf. Where Jack walked, the space remembered apparently, echoed the recollection of his presence as a fingerprint smeared across glass. “You’re _so_ much more tolerable when you aren’t speaking to me. Though it may interest you to know he was the one headstrong enough to pursue me. Your lectures and moral crusades are a bit ineffectual this time, little man.” The smile on his lips was pin-straight, tailored. Pitch leaned back against the hip level surface of his baseboard table, the hem of his robe catching against his ankles with the shift. Sanderson lingered a few feet off, closer to the doorway as he folded his arms across his chest. His features were locked into a disbelieving frown.

“Well,” the dark haired man ran a trailing gesture against the space that followed the length of his shoulders and neck- laying out his body of evidence to the silent sizing up he was receiving. “I didn’t exactly do this to myself, did I? I’ve never understood your hang-ups. If we have to tolerate a generation that over confident I might as well amuse myself with them now and then.” The blond let out an agitated breath, shaking his head as he glanced off to the room at large rather than focus on Pitch’s steady, pressing smirk. It was no business of his, as long as it didn’t interfere with his life, what went on in the other’s home. He had his opinions regardless. Opinions that made them opposing counter-parts better suited to ignoring each other, but unable to do just that. Necessity- that was what prodded him into knocking when he did.

“…Don’t…” His voice faded out again as he exhaled roughly through the word. “Seems like a good kid…” Don’t wreck him, ruin him, twist him around until there wasn’t much of _him_ left. This city did that on its own. But Pitch was a catalyst of a presence. They were a dime a dozen these days, and the trails they left behind them could stretch for miles worth of lives. The other man simply chuckled low in his throat. A hand, nails, hard teeth skipped across his memory as he turned, back to Sanderson and his nails skimming across varnished wood.

“I think _seeming_ might be his show,” he stated dryly. Seeming this. Saying that. Everyone had a circus act in this place- their personal big top production. “But you didn’t come over to trade notes on my trifles and affairs, did you?” He shot another glance behind him in time to catch the way Sanderson shifted his weight from side to side was though there were options he was actually able to actually able to weigh, to consider between. His eyes darted away and returned just as quickly as he shook his head. When held up against the pace other people conducted their lives at, this arrangement seemed to stretch back impossibly long. And the memory of the laugh on Pitch’s lips the first time they had crossed paths was just as impossibly clear. It had been all sharp realization and seeing right through each other whether they wanted to or not.

“You know,” the amusement in Pitch’s voice came entirely at the blonde’s expense as he hooked a finger through a burnished metal ring to tug open the top drawer closest to him. “Whenever I’m out running this little errand for you I have to ask myself why you don’t just find a physician, invent an ache or a pain here and there, and save yourself the inflated cost by getting it on your own.” He snapped the drawer shut again, a small brown glass and stoppered bottle in his palm. 

“And then,” his voice lowered to a driving croon as he closed the space between them. “I realize how obvious your transparencies would be. You can white knight for all the poor; lost souls you think I’m condemning and front as much as you want. But a doctor, they would know a laudanum addict when they saw one right away, wouldn’t they? And then all that morality would be for nothing.” He met the full on glare that has settled into Sanderson’s brow line with an expectant arch of his own, flipping the bottle in his hand so the boldly printed paper of the label was plain to see. ‘Whole opium’- morphine’s next of kin, all full of the same heady numbness and lulling, heavy sleep. There had been so many of them, addicts, in the army hospital- men who wheedled and charmed an extra dose out of the nurses, who slipped whatever vials they could find into their pockets come their discharge- he would have been hard pressed to not recognize those same circles under eyes, that same pallor, in the man who lived beside him. And his shame had been, was, just as vivid. There was no way to let such a golden opportunity slip by.

A sigh that wasn’t just relenting in this moment, but also consent to some higher fact they were both aware of, slipped out of the shorter man. Necessity. Meeting the other’s gaze felt much more like deciphering the reflections of fun house mirrors. He reached into his pocket, withdrawing a neatly folded bundle of Marks and offering it out wordlessly into the still space between them. Pitch stole the bills away from him with ease, skimming his thumbnail over the edge of them to separate them and make sure the total was in order. Cost plus finders fee. He tossed the bottle to the blond; another dry laugh leaving him as he almost fumbled the catch.

“Believe it or not,” he drawled, stepping easily over to the doorway, bare feet as silent as ever. “My rest was a little disturbed last night. _You_ of all people understand wanting to catch up on a few hours, surely.” For a moment he was sure there was anger in the way the other watched him walk. He didn’t know why he wasted the energy. Always trying to put his best foot forward when he could barely function in the world of the waking. “I’ll leave you to see yourself out. Sweet dreams, _Sandy_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i took some mild liberties with Sandy talking? (without dream sand it's pretty hard to write completely mute people. shhhh, just come.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> understanding what 'rich text' is for has made my existence a much more tranquil place. you're all still wonderful. and i have definitely lost control of my life.

Jack climbed the flights of stairs before him far faster than he had the ones in the building that wasn’t his own.  He never trusted himself to carry his key on him when he went out at night.  Too many things fell through the cracks in these parts.  Most of the time the front door that lead into the expansive- if now divided up between multiple parties for the sake of economics- flat was left unlocked.  If he ever did find himself shut out he was sure it was nothing pounding on the door wouldn’t mend.  The cold metal of the knob twisted in his palm as he slipped into the narrow hall that preceded their oddly communal living space.  Even before he could see them, he could hear voices bouncing off each other from further in the rooms.  It took a moment, but Toothiana’s registered, the thrum of energy her tone took on when she was excited more and more evident the longer he listened.  She must have found herself in the neighborhood already if she was visiting so early.  It slipped all of their minds, he was sure, with how much time she spent here but she did rent her own place in the Prenzlauer Berg district.

“He says he has a friend in Charlottenburg apparently,” she was explaining, quick on the syllables.  “He needs an assistant at his practice.  He said he’s trying to incorporate more things that were commonplace in the field- bring things up to speed, so to speak.  And since I worked in field hospitals…  Well, I’ve got a chance, haven’t I?” Jack stepped into the shared sitting in time to see her trail off with a loose hand gesture while she a set plate down on the table.  It went unseen by the person it was intended for if North’s voice echoing from the kitchen was anything to go by.

“Of course you do!  Is very good news, this-“ the words were just as audible and accent laced as they would have been if North had been in the same space.

“Is very good news indeed,” Jack mimicked, the accent he put forth belonging more on the stage than anywhere else.  Toothiana spun, her dress flaring around her knees.  What had been emerald made luxurious by blacks and golds was now a much subtler grey-dusted sage.

“ _Jack-_ “ Her hand darted up to her pinned braid like an anchoring point to match the dry, unimpressed look she flashed him.   It was never clear to her, if the silence in his footfalls was intentional or a habit aged past purpose.  He held up a hand- a melodramatic gesture to stem a tide of scolding that wasn’t on its way.

“Hey now,” his lip jutted out in a pout as he stepped further into the room.  “Let’s lay our guns at our feet.  I _did_ use the front door this time, after all.”  It was warm and a glance at the stove told him there was water heating in a kettle on it.  There was fullness here, even without a crowd to make the sensation valid, that he hardly bothered to register anymore.  Right now though it was the burn of lukewarm air on street-chilled hands.  There had been no cracks in the walls of Pitch’s flat, no gaps left behind by not-quite-right windowpanes.  There should have been though, his recently removed recollections demanded.  There should have been because the quiet of those rooms had echoed in a way that would have paired so perfectly with drafts.  A shiver, hours late and now staunchly out of place, crawled across his shielded skin.  Toothiana caught his blue eyes with a raised brow and he offered up a lazy smile, shaking off spectral somethings that weren’t quite unpleasant.

“I looked for you-“ the set of Toothiana’s shoulders betrayed a kind of consenting amusement.  Her back was to him once more as she laid the groundwork for another place setting.  She was grateful North had never once forced her to play the role of the relaxed, entertained houseguest.  Instead there was always a task left unclaimed and no questions asked.  “At closing, but I couldn’t find you.  Where did you run off to?”  There were no concrete promises but more often than not, come early morning and the last patrons shuffling out, their walk to the nearest Strassen-Bahn station was filled by each other’s in-time steps.  Sometimes they lingered, sometimes they couldn’t be bothered with goodbyes- ships left to sail different waters in their thoughts.

“Hmm…”  The hum was evasive- unintentionally honest and revealing that he was reluctant to share.   Jack leaned over her shoulder, holding his silence as he eyed over the part of the limited breakfast spread that had already been laid out.  Fruit preserves- the butter was running low.  It was generosity, plain and unwarranted, for North to let them use it as they saw fit.  Nimbly, his fingers curled around the amethyst hued glass that dangled from Toothiana’s earlobe.  It captured the light as he tugged on the earring delicately.  “These are nice.”

“And _this,”_ as fast as she normally slipped cigarettes from offered cases or pushed pins into her hair, she snared the cuff of the dark coat Jack had very much not been wearing the night before.  Her thumb ran across the neatly, finely done stitching.  “Is not yours.  Unless you’ve lowered yourself to stealing things.  Jack, please, where were you?  I-“

“Jack!”  The edge in Toothiana’s gaze, that had given away how she was weighing whether grasping him by the shoulder and _pressing_ for an answer was appropriate or not, vanished as quickly as it had settled in as North appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen.  His hands were occupied, clutched around a small basket of rolls no doubted picked up hours earlier from the bakery one block over and a plate with the thin cuts of meat he had seen fit to shell out for.  “Good, good- you are back.  And we are not needing search party!”  A snort of a laugh escaped Jack as he released Toothiana’s earring.  A moment later she let their conversation remain at a silent impasse as she let the coat, and his wrist, go.

“I thought I’d better spare you the trouble this time,” the younger man shot back, lips curling nonchalantly and hiding the tension that had been threatening to build between him and the dark haired woman gathering the last of the breakfast fixings from North. She set both items on the small, cluttered dining table.

“Very generous of you,” a chuckle of his own left North as he pulled out one of the wooden, high-backed chairs.  There was silent insistence in the way he looked to Toothiana- practiced patience that stated she was more than welcome to make herself at home.  That she was stealing bread from no one’s mouth by doing so.  As she sat and folded one leg over the other, Jack slipped Pitch’s coat from his shoulders.  There was no hiding the garment but he could draw less attention to it and save himself further questions he reckoned, folding it over his arm instead.  Last night’s clothes were laid bare though and that fact had him stepping idly away from the table and towards the hall that branched off into his own narrow room and the slightly larger one paid for by North’s other boarder.  The older man’s voice hurried after him as he turned, forcing him to pause mid-step.  “How is vest working out?” 

Jack ran his thumb across the bottom hem of the garment in question and the looping, barely a different shade of blue, trails of embroidery that now embellished it.  Whatever it was he had expected when North had offered to mend up the article of clothing that had seen better days and less than tender care… it hadn’t been what he’d gotten back a few days later.  There was lightness in North’s hands that should have been impossible but left him able to craft, to stitch, things with effortless ease.  He never talked much about his homeland.  Only spoke in his mother tongue when his emotions swung this way or that way.  The divided flat was in a German building, but it was filled with traces of Russia in spite of it.  The strength of the tea he brewed for breakfasts like this.  The way he wore certain things and the patterns sewn into them.  The older man was a story teller- Jack found he preferred musing on the ones not said out loud.

“It’s holding out, and how,” he tossed back over his shoulder.  There was a smile at the corners of his eyes instead of his lips this time.  It felt more cautious and more genuine all at once.  He hadn’t followed the season into Berlin looking for a home.  The idea of one was a bit too distant while it still hit a bit too close for comfort.  Just his luck that he should lodge with a man with the opposite mentality.  Whether it was a necessary evil or not, North was just another displaced person in a city of displaced people.   None of Berlin’s natives stayed in his life very long, he realized absentmindedly.  Toothiana’s flawless accent and her tongue with a talent for all the languages in her life were as close as he got.

But North, he took the space he occupied and through sheer willpower forced it to acknowledge that it was _lived_ in.  With food put out like a _meal_.  With garlands draped at the tops of doorframes.  With trinkets and baubles befitting the approaching holiday on tabletops.  There was seasoned caution in Toothiana- so Jack ambled ahead.  He tugged on stray half-curls.  He earned cuffs upside the head when he looped his arms around her waist and spun her around between clients at the club.  The wall wasn’t his to maintain, after all.  North didn’t give a damn about barriers though.  So here, here he made it his job to hold back.  To tread carefully and question if the hand that fed was just a bit too generous.

“Oh, don’t you dare start up with that… terminology of yours again.”  It was Toothiana’s voice chasing after him as he stepped away.  He met it with a laugh, already half into his room but unable to resist a parting shot.

“Anything for you, you _choice bit of calico_.”

“Jack Overland-“  Her voice was instantly muted as he shut his door, a chuckle still on his tongue.  Muted, but not so much that he couldn’t dimly make out a ‘what does that one mean?’ that was, no doubt, met with a mystified shrug from North.  He pressed his palms flat to the wood behind him for a pulled thin second.  His fingertips pushed into the smoothed out grain, eyes fixed, with no particular purpose, on the room before him.  He hadn’t lied.  If Pitch had any kind of linen closet he was sure it was comparable with the space he called his own.  All narrow, with room for the bedframe and the desk with the mirror propped up on it but not much else.  It suited the lack of material goods he called his own just fine.  There was no definite origin of the furniture.  ‘ _It is not woman who sold me flat- maybe family before.  She said they were leaving quite quickly after the war_ ,’ was all the explanation North had offered.  There was nothing to betray what had chased them out but here they were, gone.  And here he was, present.  A new square in the patchwork quilt.  A groan left him as he pushed off away from the door.  He dropped, first the coat and then himself, unceremoniously to the thin mattress.  The mirror across from him was level with his head and shoulders, offering a dusty reflection of both.  Cleaning the glass held no appeal though- it was too much _him_ in a space that really ought to not be his.  He was certain he had only managed to pay the first two weeks completely- despite North’s assurance otherwise.  Deftly, thoughtlessly, he undid the buttons at his throat. 

Night looked darker held up next to the day.  Sometimes the trees got in the way of the forest.  He skimmed a fingertip across the particularly violent mark on his nape.  It made itself known in a way just short of painful.  Instead of lingering, he stretched his hand out, tendons sliding against knuckles.  Maybe it would have been an easier pill to swallow if violence was tangible.  But it was felt, heard- not seen.  _Nothing_ had really been seen, his thoughts tugged insistently.  And that lack of accountability had seeded something giddy in him that had wondered- marveled- at the thrumming speed of Pitch’s pulse.  Sparrow-like, he decided as he turned his hand over.

 Life line, heart line, palm of Venus- all laid bare with no physical evidence to prove what he was capable of.  The older man’s heartbeat had been like cupping a sparrow in his palms and denying, denying it flight in any form.  He had no name for the brief glimpse he’d been given- but it was as though he’d been privy to a far, far too personal sickness in those seconds.  Two short knocks on the wall at his back yanked him forward into the present and out of his thoughts.  A grin crawled back on to his features as he twisted to return it with three quick raps of his own knuckles.  Through the thin plaster he could hear feet hitting the wooden floorboards and the door to the next room being thrown open none too gently.  Moments later his own was being given the same treatment with no second knock to serve as a double-check of sorts.

“You’re back!”  Jack’s grin broadened at Jamie’s lanky form, squared in the doorway with his palms pressed to the frame before he swung himself on through.  The worn mattress let out another creak of a protest as he dropped on to it by the headboard.  The older of the two let out a short laugh, cuffing his suddenly arrived guest lightly upside the head.

“Present and accounted for, sir!” he barked back with joking formality, catching the open suitcase under the bed with his shoed toe to tug it out into plain sight.  Some of the articles of clothing were folded.  Some he couldn’t be bothered with.  “What are you doing inside, kiddo?  There’s fresh snow out there- there has to be ice skating at the Wannsee and the Teirgarten.”

“Mama says we’ll go later,” the brunet shrugged a little bit, watching Jack snag one of the rumpled shirts.  He held it out at arms length before deeming it good enough.  There was no one to front for here- not like when he ventured out after sundown.  “More money from Papa came in the mail so she went to the cleaners with Sophie.  I’m not supposed to go without _adult_ supervision anymore.”  The child beside him spoke like all the kids he had interacted with so far- younger, but they had been here longer then he had and it was noticeable.  _Mama, Papa, guten Morgen._   He wondered if they even realized those replacements had snuck, and then settled, in.

“I have absolutely no idea why she would want that,” the solemn note in Jack’s voice broke into a snort of laughter after a few seconds- it had barely been restrained to begin with.  He was answered with a broad grin on Jamie’s own features- one that brazenly showed off the gap in his front teeth.  “You told her I was sorry, didn’t you?  I mean- in my defense the tooth was loose already and you did tell me to spin you faster-“

“I told her, I told her,” Jamie cut across the other with a roll of his eyes as he pinned his palms underneath his legs, feet swinging back and forth absentmindedly.  “She’s not mad- _I’m_ not mad either.  There was fifty whole pfennig under my pillow in the morning!  But she’s worried about how much a doctor costs… you know, if anything serious happened.”  The smile on the light haired man’s lips eased into something mellow as he rolled his vest clear of his shoulders, chasing it with the straps of his suspenders.  While he had been grappling with guilt- it had been years since he’d lost a tooth, did they always _bleed_ so much?- Toothiana had wordlessly reached into her clutch and pressed the fifty cent piece into the other woman’s palm.  It had been silent reminder that getting caught up in worries over the cost of living wasn’t worth losing the act of actually _living_ over.

“Her and me both-“ Jack tried to give the statement some levity with a groan and a laugh but it rang gratingly true.  In all senses of the word, he couldn’t afford a mishap.  Nor could he afford landing himself in the hot water of being responsible for one.

“Jack,” there was a groan mirrored in Jamie’s voice as he dropped back against the sheets, eyes on the ceiling before he turned his head toward the other.  “Don’t worry.  Everyone else already does- way too much.”

“Excuse you, kiddo.  Is this the face of an overly concerned someone?”  He gestured loosely to his profile, forcing any lingering tensions to the back of his mind.  It wasn’t a habit of his, to dwell on tomorrow- and how to manage it- for very long.  Out of the corner of his eye he caught Jamie shaking his head as he tossed his now unbuttoned shirt toward the foot of the bed.  In just the same way he felt the other’s gaze drop from his face to his neck and shoulders in a critical kind of way.  “What…”  The would-be question trailed off into nothing as he took in the same dusty reflection on the other side of the room.  He supposed he should have counted on scratches to accompany all the other marks.  He had probably left behind some of his own.

“Was she pretty?”  The look on Jamie’s face was startlingly close to a dry grin as he kicked his feet out into the air before him.

“Are you supposed to know about all of this yet-?”  All that earned him was a wordless, deadpan arch of a brow.  Jack rolled his eyes as he tugged the fresh work shirt over his head.  It was cover for some of the evidence- and there wasn’t much else to be done about the rest.  “Sure, she was real pretty,” he supplied with a snort.  “Quite the looker.” 

What part of that statement, he had to muse dryly, would have gotten under Pitch’s skin more?  His wry smile slipped a notch.  He could hazard a guess at the answer.  All he would have gotten was a sneer- and maybe, if the older man thought his point needed reinforcing, a hissed ‘coward’.  An hour ago he had been savoring the brazen set of Pitch’s back in his front door, as he withheld nothing from his neighbor.  Pride, hubris, everything that was so, so alluring to him- it had all seemed to come so effortlessly to the other.  And here he was- lying to a boy who trailed him around sometimes with nothing short of unconditional admiration.  The words honesty would have taken just weren’t there.  His hands met nothing as they scrabbled mentally.

“Will you see her again, will you?”  Jamie’s sock-covered toes nudged against one of his knees, pulling him up and out of his reverie all over again.  Jack let his hand drop, knuckles first, to give the brunet a kind of joking smack on the stomach.

“None of your beeswax, mister,” he forced out, a mockingly haughty twist in his tone.  “Now, get going-  You should be eating breakfast before North finishes it all off.  And tell him I don’t think I’ll be using any butter.”  With luck the older man would know to add any portion he could have used to Jamie’s own toast or roll.  The younger boy let out a puff of breath as he first sat, then stood, up- arms folded over his chest.

“Fine.  But you better come out soon.”

“I will, I will-“ Jack let the reassurance follow after him a second or so late as he bent double over himself to tug his shoes off.  His attention lingered on the suitcase by his feet, the same lack of focus back in his gaze as he eyed over the clothing.  The thud and click of his door shutting forced him to sit up straight with a start.  Jamie’s beaming features had been replaced by Toohiana- her back pressed to the wood as his had been with her arms crossed neatly.

“Christ-“ he exhaled at the sudden entrance.  The dark haired woman simply cocked an eyebrow.

“See why I scold you?” she questioned dryly.  “Not so much fun on the receiving end, is it?”  There was a pause of a beat in which Jack simultaneously offered up a wry and helpless shrug and her features sobered up all but sharply.  “Jack, you went off with him last night, didn’t you?  I thought I told you-“

“You told me to be careful-“ he retorted over her, leaning his weight back onto the heels of his palms to flash her an almost affronted glance.  This was not what he had expected a lecture on.  In fact, up until this moment, Toothiana had been very careful _not_ to lecture him.  _Not_ to get in, what could be considered, too deep.  He supposed she thought she was going about it delicately, subtly- but it read plain on her features every time.  “I was plenty careful, Tooth-“

“ _That_ is your version of careful?  _Jack-_ You don’t even know his real name-“ She hadn’t expected him to offer up such a quick and sharp counter.  Her shoulders tensed further against the door in response.  She shouldn’t bother.  The thought had been pressing against her even as she stepped over the raised board of a threshold.  It wasn’t her place and it would be so much better, easier, if she didn’t give a damn in the end.  But her tongue tripped over itself still.  “I’ve asked around, because believe it or not I have to talk to an awful lot of people in that place- and no one seems to know it.  Give me ten minutes and I’ll have the life story of the average patron.  But I have _nothing_ \- he might as well be a ghost!”

“So what-?” Jack barked back sharply in question.  His throat felt strained with the combined effort of keeping his voice down- the idea of these walls blocking any sound was a damn grand joke- and still getting across his mounting frustration.  “Who gives a damn about what his real name is-?  Half the people I introduce myself to have a good laugh, thinking I’m using an alias!  _You_ thought I was the first time North introduced us!  I had to show you my papers before you believed me.  I was careful.  I didn’t even have a drink.  I knew what I was doing and where I was going-“  He swallowed, stemming the flow of curt words as Toothiana paced shortly to the window at the far end of his room.  There was snow piled on the small sill- and on the thin rail that encircled the wrought iron fire escape.

“That doesn’t-“ She exhaled briskly through her nose, pacing back to stand before him.  Her hands clenched and then relaxed just as quickly as she fought the urge to tug on an earring or adjust one of the pins keeping her hair in place.  The buzz of nervous energy was back in her limbs.  “Can’t you see that doesn’t matter-?  People here aren’t- people aren’t _nice,_ Jack.  This city can eat you alive.  I see it happen all the time- I feel it happening to _me_ sometimes.  I’m paid to pretend like I’m having the time of my life each and every night.  But sometimes- sometimes I can’t picture a place more miserable and lonely than Berlin.”

“You think-“ Jack cut himself off with an agitated breath of his own, fingers twisting sharply into the folded duvet he sat on.  There was a laugh on his lips before he could catch it.  It pressed against his own ears, sounding oddly cold even to him. “You think I don’t know how god damn _lonely_ it can be?  You think I don’t walk around and realize how _isolated_ I am sometimes-?  Toothiana, at least when you kiss someone it’s the _right_ someone.  I don’t even have that-“ 

Nor could he give himself the credit for her knowing the kind of someone he did kiss.  It hadn’t been a moment of honesty.  He couldn’t remember whom she had passed by and seen him with, a face, another not very noteworthy one.  She had noticed, she had guessed, and she had asked.  He had just been foolish enough to let his guard down long enough to nod.  Two seconds had gone skipping by and the cat had come crawling out of the bag.

“Jack-“  She bit her cheek as the light haired man held up a hand curtly.

“Would you let me finish-?”  His lips were twisted down into a thin, rigid frown.  “So, every now and then, it’s nice to find a guy who’ll kiss you back and pretend not to be so alone for a few hours, for a night- _You_ do it too.  I know you do.”  The way Toothiana’s eyes flicked to the side for just long enough served as well as any confession.  “I’m not looking to fall in love.”  He had yet to meet someone who had successfully managed that.  All the best to whoever did, but from where he was sitting the idea seemed laughable.  “I’m just trying to have a good time.  I’m sorry if I don’t care where he’s been or what he’s done, really.  I’m sorry if I don’t give a damn about his real name.  Let’s be honest, _we_ don’t know that much about each other, do we?  So for once, when I woke up and Mr. Gung-Ho-About-It-All hadn’t scurried off under the cover of darkness when it sank in who he’d had a roll in the sheets with…”  The silence he trailed off into was heavy.

“… Fine,” when the word finally left Toothiana it hit air that might as well have been as dense as lead.  She scuffed her heel across the long dulled varnish of the floor, the cropped hem of her dress swaying again.  “Fine.  It’s your call.  But Jack- this city draws you in and then it locks you in.  God knows, this wasn’t what I wanted to do.  I wanted to keep nursing or maybe get into dentistry- I learned enough about it on the side from the man I worked under.  But I’m trapped.  Every ‘connection’ I make through a customer ends up a dead-end.”  Which was why, as much as she wanted it to be otherwise, she didn’t have much faith in the newest one to crop up.  “We can keep dancing around each other.  We can be as evasive as we like, because that’s what people do in this place.  But I don’t think I can let you wake up one morning and find yourself in the same place as me without at least trying to stop it.  I want you to promise me something- actually _promise_ this time.”

“What-?”  There was still caution lurking around the edges of his voice but Jack could feel that the hostility had drained out of it.  His light eyes followed Toothiana as she let her weight shift from foot to foot.  Swinging to an inaudible tune- and she probably didn’t even realize it.

“Take two nights off,” she breathed, forcing their gazes to lock as she swallowed dryly.  “Don’t find another club or a dive of a hole in a wall.  Just… eat supper here.  Read a book.  Try to convince North that if he makes us smoke on that narrow balcony it’s only fair for him to crack a window when he lights that awful pipe.  Do something, _anything_ , besides going out.  Besides finding him again, or finding someone else-“  Anything that would maybe remind the younger man that there were things to be done outside of chasing after a cure for the ache Berlin fueled in all of their cores.  Their eyes still meeting in steadily, Jack pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth.

“Deal-“ he uttered, the word quick and brisk before he could think to maybe not speak it at all.  Like a rope being cut, whatever tension had remained slipped away as he let his shoulders slump, fingers running through the untidy strands of his hair.  “… I could murder for a smoke.”  Toothiana rolled her eyes, the expression good-natured at its roots.  She undid the clasp of the purse on her shoulder deftly, pulling out the same gold case.  What right did she have to lecture?  The thought echoed like an inward sigh.  She preached kicking and protesting, but used what perks were handed her way all the same.

“Can’t you buy your own?” she questioned dryly, offering it out to him.  He slid one free before snapping it shut with a sharp click and a cavalier shrug.

“Maybe someday.  When I am, at last, a great man at the top of his game,” Jack drawled wistfully, earning another raised brow at the display of melodrama.

“Mhm,” Toothiana knew how unconvinced she sounded.  “I have to get going.  I’m late as it is.  Don’t forget to eat, please?  North said he would leave something out for you… Do you need a light before I go?”  The light haired man simply shook his head, unlit cigarette already balancing delicately between his lips.

“I have matches somewhere,” he stated around it.  She nodded, stepping toward the door.  Before she opened it though, she glanced back over her shoulder.

“I’m sure I’ll see you in two nights then- if I don’t get a chance to visit beforehand.”  The door was closed behind her before Jack was certain she had seen his wave of consent.  He rose to his feet, tongue pressed to his cheek as his eyes landed on the black coat still lying starkly on his sheets.  He had matches, but he was almost certain he had left them in the sitting room.  He would go out… just not quite yet.  If what he had seen was any kind of indication, Pitch was a far more habitual offender than he was when it came to smoking.  He unfolded the coat with more delicacy than was really needed, fingers dipping into the right and then left-hand pocket.  Both times they came up empty.  As much as the cigarette still pinned between them would allow, he bit at his bottom lip, tugging the garment open to slide his hand into the inside breast pocket as well.

No matches.  No lighter.  Instead, his fingers met something that felt like a thin strap of slightly weathered leather.  For a moment he entertained the thought that, maybe, he ought to leave well enough alone.  It vanished just as quickly, as he pulled the strap out.  One end was tied in a knot- the other had a thin steel disk looped on to it.  Jack snagged it between his thumb and forefinger as he sidestepped over to the window and the strained winter light coming through it.  There were nicks in the tough metal but the information stamped on to it still read plain as day. 

A serial number followed by a letter that must have denoted a rank graced the top of it.  In the center a ‘ _CE_ ’ that stood alone and unembellished.  His eyes rested fixedly on the letters that followed the circle’s bottom curve though.  With the same mechanically measured space between them as all the rest of the characters, read the name ‘ _Kozmotis Pitchiner_ ’.  His teeth sank further into his lip, cigarette or no cigarette.  Whether he gave a damn or not, Jack had the feeling he had just been handed the given name Pitch had kept so carefully guarded.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well this took way longer than intended. if you're still sticking around- bless your soul. hopefully the next one won't take nearly as long to get up. (there might be some typos- proof reading gets spotty after midnight)

Jack wasn’t sure he could call the way he had kept his promise to Toothiana intentional.  She had tried before over small things, little incidents.  Maybe, she would offer, he could not stay until closing this time.  And could he please lend North a hand with this, that, or the other if he had a spare moment.  It was as though she had convinced herself that maybe if he verbally signed those slight pacts she would have done something to help steady out the off-temp pace he conducted himself at.  He straddled a thin line.  Between a detached sort of appreciation and the him that was far too used to being the wayward face on a train do to much more than laugh at laws designed to govern his living.  She wanted something to ease her conscience before a bed.  A deed that said ‘ _you’ve done all you can’_.  Here he was now, in the middle of his second _‘take two nights off’_ , finally giving her just that.

Sleep had found him last night before he could consider doing anything besides honoring his quickly spoken ‘ _deal’._ An all-consuming, dreamless kind of rest that had contrasted so sharply with the buzzing in his brain which had persisted through the day.  The hoard of half-formed questions had left him dizzy in a way that had nothing to do with the cigarette he had eventually smoked, perched on the sill of his window as he turned the disk over and over again between his fingers. The back was also imprinted with a series of letters and numbers- though he could come up with no translation for the shorthand.  He’d looped the strap around his wrist several times, tucking it under the cuff of his shirt.   Even after leaving his room in favor of the flat’s more common spaces his fingers had continued to blindly search out and find the tag, worrying it with his thumb as though there was something else to see in it- if only he pressed or pinched in just the right way.

“Page… page…” the drowsy insistence was accompanied by a small hand, curling into and tugging on his shirt.  Forcibly, it brought him back to the warmth of the cast iron stove a few feet off and the unevenly distributed weight of Sophie- who had started off fully on his lap.  And then slowly but surely slipped until she only half remained, the rest of her filling in the spare inches between him and the armchair’s upholstered rest.

“Sorry, kiddo,” the muted apology left Jack on his next breath as he balanced his chin on top of her head, jokingly blowing away a few stray blond hairs from near his mouth.  His eyes wandered to the book balanced on his knees in question.  With some amount of delicacy he snuck an arm around the small form resting against his to flip the thin page onto the next.  Another few lines of text beside another simple black and white illustration.  “You caught me thinking.”

“She just likes the pictures anyway,” Jamie’s voice rose up to meet him accompanied by a roll of his eyes. The boy’s back was pressed to the seat and leg of the chair beside Jack’s knees.  His gaze was narrowed against the low light as a he peered down at the lined notebook spread open on his own legs.  It’s pages were no doubt meant for writing exercises and simple math when their mother had the time to sit down and at least try to give Jamie some form of schooling.  The sheets of paper were covered in many more childish doodles of faces and things from around the flat then attempts to write cursive  ‘a’s though.  “You don’t really have to read it, you know.”

“What-?” Jack started, nudging the brunette in the side with his bare toes.  A small hand came up to hit his foot away but he persisted until he dragged something like a crooked, toothy smile on to Jamie’s features.  “Don’t like Peter Rabbit or something?”

“That’s the _only_ book she wants people to read to her,” the words came out like a groan to match the half formed pout on his lips.  Jack didn’t quite bite back the laugh that bubbled up in him at the all but baleful glance the other gave him from the floor.

“Bunny…” Sophie spoke up sleepily again as if confirming the statement.  She sacrificed her hold on the light haired man’s shirt in favor of pressing her hand to the page in question.  Though her fingers were spread as far as they could they still looked oddly dwarfed by everything around them.  Blatantly and unapologetically fragile.  She had no sense yet that there was any other way to be.  Any other way to present yourself.  As inappropriate and out of place as it was, Jack felt something aggressively jealous twist in his gut.  Violent enough to bring a pang of almost nausea with it.  Even their mother carried the same ease to an extent.  ‘ _I have to run out tonight,’_ she had stated earlier.  Followed quickly by, ‘ _if it’s not too much trouble._ ’  She had enough blind faith to trust them with her children.  It wasn’t misplaced trust exactly but…  She was a decent woman- he didn’t _know_ her all the same.  He liked North- he couldn’t exactly say he knew the other man either.  Hell, he was pretty damn sure he didn’t know _himself._ Just a few years ago the whole world had gone to war.  What were any of them capable of?  Toothiana had been so quick to lecture on how many of Berlin’s citizens were less than good-willed.  She was preaching to the choir.

“I am thinking,” North’s voice cut into the silence they had lulled into once more.  Sophie’s eyes had drifted shut while he had wandered down the passages of his own thoughts again and her breathing had slowed to almost sleeping rate without him taking notice.  His eyes flicked up to take in the other man framed in the doorway to the hall, chasing the constant press of his doubts away with a half a grin.  “Is time for bed.”

“But-“ though he hadn’t said much the past few hours Jamie was quick with the protest, his lips parted slightly in silent emphasis.  It was answered with a low chuckle as North stepped into the room and offered the boy a hand to pull him to his feet.

“I promised your mother not too late,” he stated, almost apologetically.  He could sympathize with the allure what was technically breaking the rules of the house.  “And it is already late.”  He glanced at Jack and Sophie’s half-asleep form in his lap and arms.  The younger man shook his head a little, lips easing down to something relaxed as he shut the book as carefully as he could.  He tucked the slimly bound pages between the frame of the chair and the cushion with a vague intention to collect it later.

“I’ve got her,” he stated quietly, adjusting his grip under the blonde’s legs to make sure she wouldn’t slip as he stood with a melodramatic grunt.  Jamie was on his feet as well, notebook shut and pencils collected in a firm fist.  Jack shifted his balance, lifting a knee even with Sophie’s added weight to give the brunet a nudge in the small of his back.  “Let’s beat it.”  He earned another wordless protest from the younger boy, a frown in the knit of his brow, but they started for the hall all the same- an ungainly three-man band of a procession.

Though it was hardly a foot or so away from his own he rarely entered the room paid for by the children’s mother.  The atmosphere that North brought to the rest of the space crept in to it even when the door was latched.  It felt more… existed in than his own.  All their clothes folded or hung, suitcases tucked away somewhere they couldn’t be seen.  Some of Jamie’s drawings had been carefully tacked to the wall.  The family of three had been here months longer than he had, he knew.  But some touches had nothing to do with time.  He was reluctant to make his narrow four walls feel like anything other than a stop on the road- because he just didn’t know, did he?  If or when packing up would ever feel like the more prudent thing to do.

“We’re not supposed to sleep in our clothes,” Jamie reminded him as he dropped his drawing materials off on the surface of the writing desk under the small window.

“C’mon now, have a bit of faith in me,” Jack retorted, voice a little muffled as he stepped over to the edge of the bed shared by the two.  The blond still in his arms was forced to stir as he set her down on the sheets.  “Arms over your head, Soph.”  The movement was groggy as she complied with the prompt.  Her muscles remained slack in a way that made it just a little harder for Jack to tug off the outer dress she had been wearing since morning.  Absentmindedly, he glanced around- unsure where to leave the garment even as he folded it as best he could.  Another reminder of the fact he was just a guest in this space.  Jamie dropped onto the mattress, reaching out to give his sister’s plain cotton slip a quick tug and straighten it out properly.

“But Jack, what if I can’t sleep?”  It was bordering on a whine but something told Jack the other felt no need to double-check his tone.  He bit his cheek to hold back a snort of a laugh, dropping Sophie’s embroidered dress at the end of the bed.

“I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to, kiddo,” he stated dryly.  It wasn’t what he wanted to say.  He wanted to say he was just a knock away.  That he could stay in here and finish the book or draw stories out of the air to recite to them.  But caution, caution, _distance_ always kicked in.  Toothiana, North- if he left it would be nothing personal to them.  Jamie though,-Jamie looked at him sometimes like he was a figurehead with all the answers.  Letting him in any closer would only be dropping him from a higher height at the end of the day.  “Close those eyes and give it a go.”  The light haired man spared another moment to ruffle Jamie’s own cropped strands before backing toward the door.  A disgruntled look from the other and a barely audible yawn from Sophie chased after him even as he shut the door behind him with a wry grin and a loose wave.

Jack hesitated outside of his own door though, fingers dragging over the cold metal of the doorknob.  Even when stray currents of air slipped in under doors or through where the windows left open in summer and now shut tightly met their frames the whole of the apartment stayed relatively warm.  They were lucky to have consistent heating- to board with a man who could afford it in the first place.  The contrast against his skin was still welcome.  He could easily turn in now but…  His teeth found the inside of his cheek once more, biting down and worrying the skin.  With a silent exhale he passed by it and into the kitchen where the thrum of life fluctuated but never fully dissipated.  North was half hunched over one of the countertop, the light of the streetlamp outside haloing the square set of his shoulders.  It was a contrast to the room he had briefly glimpsed and then helped himself to in Pitch’s flat.  It was open and there was the sense that things happened here.  That faces passed in and out.  Rather than the tightly closed curtains and the itching sense that he was encroaching on something only meant for one that he’d left behind the other morning.  There were eddies of wind pulling at the snow that had tenuously piled up on the window ledge.  Another front blowing in.

“Tea?”  The accent that tugged at the word would have stood out in the cramped town he’d left behind.  Here it just blended into the background noise.  Everyone was from somewhere.  No one honestly wanted to know.  No one gave much of a damn.  With a grunt Jack pushed himself up on to the edge of the small table that he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone eat at.  There were always too many faces around so they gathered around the one he could see in his peripheral vision one doorway over.

“I’m set,” he declined easily, slouching forward over his knees faintly as North turned to lean against the counter, his own mug of something no doubt strong and black cupped in his palms.  Thoughtlessly, Jack’s fingers wander to the silver disk resting against his wrist.  The cord pulled on is skin slightly- a leash to keep it in place even as he flipped it between his fingers.

“What is it-?”  The older man was looking at him almost pensively when he met his gaze, getting a nod of the chin toward the small token of proof of…something he had accidentally taken along with him.  “You have been worrying it for two days now.  Must be important.”

“It’s-“  Jack’s voice stalled out a little bit.  Instinctively, he wanted to tuck it away again but the damage was done.  “It’s not really…  Just something I found- at the club.”  In a round about way there was some truth to that.  The eyebrow North arched was skeptical but patient.

“May I see it?” he pressed after a moment, lowering his mug away from his lips.  There was an after-note of the jam he had spooned in to sweeten the bold brew lingering on the back of his tongue as he waited.  Jack wasn’t entirely sure why he was hesitating even as he slowly undid the leather strap from around his arm.  It wasn’t his to keep or give.  Nor did it necessarily mean much out of context.  He dropped it like a dead weight into the palm the other had offered out.  It felt like one too, the longer he carried it around.  A deadweight.  Full of potentials and ‘what ifs’ and questions.

“British army tag.”  It looked much more immaterial in North’s hand, less valuable and more breakable.  The soft clink of his mug against the countertop sounded louder than it ought to as Jack offered up what he hoped was a misinformed shrug.  He had guessed.  But he hadn’t been certain.  “Is odd thing to find at a club.”  There was a laugh laced through the words as North turned over the small piece of metal once, taking in the name embossed on it before he offered it back out to the younger man watching him.

“Well, you know the crowd-“ Jack started, a snort of his own in the words.  He supposed it was better behaved than some of its contemporaries but people still threw punches and found love affairs better not talked about the next day.  Evidently he was one of them now.   “You sure that’s what it is though?”

“I’ve seen few in my day,” North inclined his head with a slight wink, leaning back on the heels of his palms as he watched as the makeshift pendant was tucked up and away under the cuff of the younger man’s shirt once more.  “Is definitely one.”

“Did you ever serve?”  Jack hoped the question didn’t sound too evasive when there was genuine curiosity in it.  He didn’t want the details of how it had come into his possession to be examined too thoroughly but he was also always wondering-  The man before him was never without an engaging, rapid-fire tale on the tip of his tongue.  Still, he was always left dryly musing over how much of his descriptions of petty theft and high times was truth and how much was heightened for the sake of pulling laughs from Jamie and Sophie.  “Not the British army- obviously.  But in Russia?”  North’s lips tugged up into a lopsided grin at that- a grin that was like peeling back a decade or two.  He could see the younger man that had been there- twenty, twenty-five years ago.  Hazardously handsome and reckless for the sake of recklessness if the tales were any kind of personal narrative.  The archetypal Cossack who obeyed no laws but his own.  With a blade as his confidant but a smile that seemed to ease the edge.   

The older man’s own light gaze had wandered over to the doorframe Jack had come through, or rather the garlands and baubles balancing on the slim ledge it provided.  Come the end of November a whole weekend had been devoted to digging out the decorations and filling as many of the flat’s surfaces with the trinkets and bits of shine.  A few missteps and trod on toes later and the place had finally started to reflect the approaching holiday- though the tree wasn’t entirely as grand as he’d hoped to make it.  Times and been lean.  And they were getting leaner.  They weren’t the only ones awkwardly dipping and dodging out of each other’s way in tight quarters.  The government seemed to be joining the dance as well.  Going left when they should go right.  And right when maybe it was best to take a step back.  He’d witnessed one regime coming toppling, crumbling down and he was starting to worry he would see history repeat itself here too.

He did his best to stop it on the stoop.  To hold back the tide of a fretful world that had ruled so much of his life.  There were not enough safe havens out there.  So he tried to compensate.  Tried to make the grandest one he could stand to create.  He was generous, maybe overly so- but sleep would have been hard to find if he had been anything less.  And he cared- cared to the point of maybe picking favorites when he didn’t aim to.  He could see himself in Jack though.  In the slouch of his shoulders and the wild, consequence-less absolution he seemed to strive for.  He did what he did because he desired to.  Because it was pleasant or amusing.  But he did so with the world an arm’s breadth away from him- held back, back at the ends of his fingertips.  That more than anything else, North sympathized with.

Life could tilt you to one side.  Make you jilted.  Make you skittish.  Berlin was a gray, mournful thing of a companion filled with people too bold for anywhere else but not bold enough leave.  Moscow, St. Petersburg- they were cities just as willing to spurn and give you a cold shoulder when you lacked the right company or wandered into the wrong crowd.  He didn’t say anything when Jack slipped away for a day- maybe two, maybe three.  Toothiana pressured him to every time when he mentioned that, no; he hadn’t seen the boy for a bit.  He left the front door of the apartment unlocked though- trusting his reputation of being physically capable to keep out uninvited houseguests.  He left it unlocked and waited for that fretful flightiness to fade away.  It always did and when it went the idea of a home wasn’t so terrifying anymore.  It took time and a different kind of courage to know you couldn’t flee your responsibilities forever.  The aches and the scrapes healed as fast as they came when you started facing them.  Hopefully the years would pass and Jack would grow into that- grow further into his own.

“No,” he finally responded with a laugh, fingers absentmindedly stroking down his bread as the dull thud of Jack’s foot against a table leg yanked him out of his reverie.  “No, Russian army was much too militant for me.”  The redundancy of that drew a laugh from the younger man.  “But I did have interesting run in with officer once after maybe picking up purse that was not mine and instead his wife’s in a restaurant.  Almost got away with it too- but waiter ratted me out.”

“Are you ever serious,” Jack snorted, arms folding over his chest as he arched a brow skeptically at North.  “About all of this jewel thief and burglary stuff?”  His lips tugged further to one side as the other simply tapped a finger to the side of his nose knowingly.

“Never,” he chuckled, accent thickening on the syllables a bit as if for dramatic effect.  “Am I saying anything about jewels.  Cash is what pays bills and debts, you know.”  If he wasn’t so used to not being able to pull a straight answer out of the man who was technically, even if he neglected to think that way, his landlord- then Jack might have groaned.  As it stood he’d become pretty damn used to it.  With a puff of breath he let his head roll back against his shoulders, eyes on the ceiling before he peered out at the other under the cover of his lids and lashes.

“What were you then?” he drawled, feet swinging and catching the wood of the nearby leg once more.  “Some kind of revolutionary?”  He had still been Michigan-bound when the reports had started trickling into the papers and then into the daily gossip.  The people were up in arms, they’d said.  Things were changing over there, they’d whispered.  It had seemed distant- like late autumn thunder that built up and threatened hail along with its lightning but never actually came closer than the horizon.  It wasn’t so distant now- a train ride next door- but it still felt removed.  Pitch had accused him of lacking depth- of not comprehending _sufferings_ on a worldly scale.  No, he hadn’t trudged through the rats and the mud of the trenches.  He had watched though, as young man after young man left- some returning as fragments of themselves.  He hadn’t lived in a city where revolutionaries had their teeth in the throat of the governing system but there was a kind of violence in their own streets too.  It was sneaky.  Mundane and easy to over look.  But you couldn’t help but see it every time you went out.

“No, not that either-“  North’s voice suddenly dipped into something weighed down, heavy.  The ghost of his younger self had seemingly tipped its hat and slipped away fully with that question.  It would be back, he was sure, next time Jamie insisted on a story not printed in any book but evidently its presence had been deemed inappropriate.  “I was bit of a coward, really.  I ran.  Didn’t want to be a part of any system- people or tsar’s.   There was not much middle ground between red and white by then.”  Jack’s lips pursed- coward had a harsh grate to it.  Brutally honest in the way you glossed over when it drifted through your thoughts.

“Well, look at me-“ he scoffed, a note of self-deprecation mixing in with the lack of humor.  “I’m just running.”  No bombshells and mortars- no blood and new order.  He had followed the train tracks in just like he’d said.  He was walking the earth as best he could because it seemed _fun-_ easier.

“Is normal-“ it came like reassurance and forced him to glance back up at the steady gaze North was giving him.  “But… is also not terrible.  Having purpose or stability.  Home to come back to and a place to work.  I ran but this is what I found.  Is not so bad- I like to think.”  Toothiana was under the impression that with the right words Jack would suddenly be grounded.  A constant instead of a variable.  Maybe the right words would do it but they would have to be Jack’s own.  No one could guide him to the end conclusion.

 “Guess not-“ within the few seconds of North’s reply the younger man had managed to pull back into wry observation once more.  “I’m fond of the food anyway.”  Purpose.  Direction.  Something just short of a panicked kind of pressure fluttered up to his throat.  He slipped out so that the walls wouldn’t feel so close.  They were pressing in again now that he’d been staring at them for two nights.

“Well, this I hope-“ the sobriety that had been in North’s tone fled too with another chuckle.  He pressed the backs of two of his fingers to the side of his mug, letting out a noise that could have been disgruntled as the ceramic registered as cooled past being enjoyable to drink.  As balm to the insult he reached up to the small shelf situated above the stove.  He nudged aside the small, boldly painted Räuchermann to collect a pipe and a the turquoise tin of pipe tobacco beside it.

“I’m supposed to lecture you on lighting that up inside,” Jack noted with an arched brow as he watched the other pack the dry leaf into the end of the pipe with the same delicacy that he stitched or mended the occasional broken toy with.  It seemed to be common knowledge on the block that the Russian was the man to come to for those things.  It was equally as well known that he would never have the heart to charge for the service.  “Since you make us crack open windows and step out on the balcony in the middle of December for cigarettes.”

“Is my flat- we go by my rules,” North stated easily around the end now between his lips.  Jack’s smile pulled a little bit tighter- suddenly feeling off balance as he blinked.  The kitchen was warmly lit but he suddenly felt yanked back and hauled away from it.  Hauled back to a room that lacked any light- where people were contours and shadows instead of faces and selves.  ‘ _My home, my rules’_. 

The fluttering something was still there, just under his breastbone now.  The urge to seek, to do- because what else _was_ there?  The other was comfortable with the place he called home and the purpose he felt for himself.  When he turned inward, looked for that, the only thing there was a stillness that terrified him.  With a thud he was back on the floor once more, deftly undoing the ID tag from his wrist all over again to lay it on the table.  Just because he’d been handed an ace didn’t mean he had to play it yet.  Leaving it here meant he couldn’t slip up.

“I’ve gotta go out-“ he announced- leaving no room for counter-arguments.  North, after all, knew nothing about his promise and he’d so _nearly_ made it that it had to count for something.  He hadn’t signed a blood oath.  The tobacco the older man had packed into his pipe flared to life and then diminished to an ember at the head of the match he had struck.

“For long?”  It was a question but it in no way held up the pale haired man as he twisted, catching his fingertips at the edges of the doorframe with a shrug.

“Don’t wait up,” he hummed back in fleeting response before his grip dropped and he slipped away down the hall.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sometimes i lay awake at night and dream a world where it doesn't take me literally months to get something up. but hey man, semester's finally done. if you're still sticking around you have my admiration on top of all my love

Even with his hasty departure Jack had paused long enough in his bedroom to collect the coat he’d been lent, sliding into the faintly oversized cloth on his way out the door.  It didn’t feel familiar exactly- but there was something comfortable about it anyway.  It wasn’t until he was attempting to trace his steps from the general vicinity of the club back to the brownstone he had been guided to that the logistics of what he was doing caught up with him.  He was certain he could find the building- but that was it.  There was no law that said Pitch had to be in- not when the other actually seemed to go out rather frequently.  There was something about the way he conducted himself though that made it hard to picture him running any errands during the daylight hours.  The concept of him picking up food or browsing any kind of shop seemed like a fallacy.

When he slipped through the graveyard silence of the lobby and up to the third floor it seemed like a worse idea.  By the time he knocked on the door and received no response Jack was already coming up with a dozen ways he could have done this better.  He’d been given a ticket back in but he honestly doubted that Pitch had handed it over with the expectation that he would turn up on the threshold of his front door like a Victorian orphan seeking shelter from a storm.  He could have swung into the club and checked there first- risky, maybe, considering it was one of the nights Toothiana was there… But in the press of people what would have been the chances of her catching sight of him? 

The scrape of his teeth across his tongue wasn’t as grounding as he would have liked it to be even as he tucked his hands into the coat pockets.   The weighty fabric twisted under the slight fists his fingers curled into as he slid down to sit haphazardly on the cold stone of the floor, his eyes fixed on the scuffed leather tops of his shoes.  Mindlessly, he drew mental lines between the marks he could have easily rubbed away if he’d set aside ten minutes to do so- crafting them into star maps and constellations to replace the cloud covered sky he’d been under.

The claustrophobic nerves from the kitchen had started to dissipate as soon as he’d been on the cobblestone sidewalk again, but phantom bits of them remained.  What was left wasn’t going to be cured by fresh air, he supposed.  While he didn’t exactly want company in this moment he didn’t want to be alone either.  In the few hours of privacy they’d gotten the other night Pitch had pushed and taunted him into acknowledging what he wanted- shoved him forward and told him he had better become okay with taking or he wasn’t going to get much of anything out of the night.  But he also hadn’t handed Jack any… expectations.  Any preconceived notions of right or proper or how anything would play out. 

It was like he had tucked him under a lens and waited to see how far he would dare to go.  Waited to see if the bold, brash shell he knew he wore like a shield actually seeped down into the interior of who he was.  Unnerving maybe, now that he could pick apart the moments instead of being wrapped up in them.  But liberating.  That was what he wanted- company with that same raw, organic freedom to it.  And he had only found that one place so far.  It wasn’t until a pair of shined shoes so sharply in contrast with his own came to stop dead center in his field of vision that the presence of anyone beside himself registered.  With a jerk of his neck, Jack was once more peering up into the calculated set of Pitch’s features.

“If it isn’t the matchstick girl herself, come to freeze to death on my doorstep-“ Though the older man’s voice was low it sounded obscene bouncing off the bare walls around them.  There was a chanced grin on Jack’s lips as he jumped to his feet, hands still tucked away out of sight as he swung the overcoat in closer to his narrow frame.

“Yeah,” he agreed, trying to reason his pulse into something steady again.  He wasn’t entirely certain if it was surprise or excitement that had spiked it.  “And I’m kind of all out of matches.  So, I guess this is the part where either you take pity on me or I go into the great beyond.”

“And what a loss to our world you would be, Frost,” the word were accompanied by the press of Pitch’s fingers to the shorter man’s shoulder- forcing him to side step as he made to unlock the door barring them from his rooms with the key that had very much ingrained itself in Jack’s memory.  Perhaps because of the metal.  It matched eerily well with the lighter he had been thrown back in the booth.  The hall was as dark as it had been too, when it was laid bare like the poorly defined but yawning mouth of something.  There was no encouragement for him to follow after as he was brushed past but he also wasn’t dissuaded.   “I was unaware,” Pitch finally picked up as the outside world was closed off once more.  “That being loaned a coat now translates as permission to turn up everywhere and anywhere that you might please.

“Yeah, well…”  Jack glanced up as the back of his neck prickled like there were eyes on it-  The only thing he was greeted with though was the narrow smile Pitch had thrown him over his shoulder.  Impossibilities aside, for a second he had the distinct impression that the other was well informed of every thought that had been so recently buzzing around his head.  “Felt a bit of cabin fever coming on-“ there were things further from the truth.  “Had to get out before I went stark, raving mad.”

“To add insult to injury-“  Pitch’s tone suggested he hadn’t bothered to register what the his excuse was.  He hooked his own outerwear nimbly to one of the manmade branches of his coatrack.  He’d left one of the lights in the sitting room on as he’d gone out and it threw an anachronistic square of yellowed illumination out onto the floorboards of the hall.  It also served as the guide he stepped towards it, once more taking for granted that Jack would follow without request.  The footsteps on his heels were enough to confirm he hadn’t been off the mark.  “You’ve kept me waiting.”  This time there was hesitation in the way the other found the seat he had claimed as his own the previous night.  Pitch had settled into his own with the same fluid air of borderline lethargy, fingers curling against the upholstery.

“Waiting-?  What, at the club?” Jack scoffed around the words with a loose, disbelieving laugh.  “Careful- next you’ll start saying you enjoy my company.”  The room hadn’t changed.  Though the anthology of fairy tales he had wrested down was back in its proper place.  He hadn’t come in with a plan and suddenly he felt even more off balance.  Last time there’d been something agreed on- it was practically a transaction. This was a visit.

“Hardly,” there was a raised brow directed at him as he continued to take in the space. Details registered clearer when he wasn’t overeager for what was to come next- not to mention being passed a glass of what he had to assume was worthwhile brandy. 

There was a fading pattern in the wallpaper.  Flowers, if the dim lights weren’t playing tricks on his eyes- clusters of hydrangeas with morning glories wrapped around their stems.  At least that’s what he memory provided him with.  He was a long way away from any childhood summertime gardens.  The paper was trace remnant of the previous occupants, he supposed.  Or maybe the ones before.  In either way it was nothing Pitch would have selected for himself.  The ashtray on the table to the dark haired man’s right was also filling up and in need of a cleaning out. 

“But I had built up a tolerance for the way you insistently barged into my evenings.  And then like a _boy_ you’re suddenly nowhere to be found once you have what you want from the world.”

“Been a bit busy…” Jack muttered, shooting him a sidelong look.  “Do you get something out of calling me that?“  His gaze wandered again- loosely finding the walls around them.  The high ceiling was novel worthy.  If he’d bothered to invest his time in pouring over the classics he was sure he could have come up with an exact title to compare them to.  Instead he finally tugged the borrowed coat free of his shoulders.  It bunched around his hips on the chair as he brought a knee up to his chest, examining Pitch over it almost carefully. 

He wasn’t sure the other had meant anything flattering by the words but that was how they resonated.  If nothing else he’d made enough of an impression that, good or bad, his absence had… registered.  His absence was rarely if ever felt, he knew.  There were never any telegrams tracking him down when he upped and left.  No one standing in the doorway to bar it and stop him from making a rash decision at three in the morning when the rest of the world was comfortably asleep.  His question though, was met with a sharp, fluid laugh.

“Oh no,” Pitch countered, fingers skimming along the slope of his neck under the guise of tugging the knot of his tie straight.  The movement did exactly what it was meant to, drawing Jack’s eyes to the bared skin there.  He inclined his chin just enough to display a flash of the bruises still lingering around his windpipe.  They had soured to a yellow-green at their edges.  “I think we both remember what I… indulge in.”

“You’re the kind of bastard they write psychoanalysis reports on-“ Jack hissed shortly through his teeth like he was trying to push away the shiver that had traveled down his spine.  He’d thought he had tossed that memory far enough away from him the morning after to no longer feel it.  But it was still there- fresh, raw, and open.  He wasn’t going to confuse the way Pitch had guided his hand to his throat with a display faith or trust.  It was apathy.  For his life, toward himself.  The same apathy that seduced him every time he cut ties and ran for the nearest train station.  The smile on the older man’s lips was cutting.

“I think Freud would have something on say on all of us,” he stated, deceptively mild through the curve of mouth.  “But in particular, young men who bother to squeeze tight enough to leave proof for the morning.”  Jack scoffed into the beat of silence he let hang in the air, pushing himself out of his chair with a short jerk.  If he ignored the fact that the panicked thrum of Pitch’s pulse as it did what it was meant to do and kept him alive had been as seductive as upping and leaving for a new city at the drop of a hat-  If he ignored that, then he could pretend he hadn’t been seduced by it at all.  His feet pushed him back toward the bookshelf he had inspected on his last visit, eyes dancing over the organized and unmoved spines.

“So… Faust-?“ he felt as though he was awkwardly announcing the next speech after a particularly bad toast.  It wasn’t a subtle way to push the conversation in a new direction but Pitch allowed it as he stood from his own seat.  Glass chimed on glass again as he plucked up the same bottle of brandy.

“Faust,” he confirmed briefly, throwing Jack’s back a glance over his shoulder.  The younger man tucked his hands into the pockets of his un-ironed slacks, rolling back on his heels a little bit to turn the movement into a fluid ripple that ran down his narrow set frame.  “Have to honor the language of the city somehow.  Though Goethe was a much more worldly man than the provincial idiots I buy my groceries from.”  The younger man didn’t quite stifle his laugh.  So Pitch did bother with the boring and the mundane like eating.  He still couldn’t picture the whiplash of a man behind him running errands though.

“Lookin’ to be redeemed for some horrible act then?” he questioned with a short scoff, missing the brief shift in Pitch’s shoulders as they tensed momentarily.  Instead he eyed the level of the brandy in the cut glass it had been poured in to.  It was enough; he decided absentmindedly as he swallowed tightly around a shallow mouthful of it.  The laugh that followed with sharp but airy and genuine in it’s own way.

“Trust me, Frost- redemption is not on my list of day to day concerns.   Any priest in any church in this city will tell you he’s never seen my face at a service. Why do you ask?”

“Well, that’s the point isn’t it?”  Jack ran his thumb briefly across the volume in question.  The title was done in the same script that graced any of the train platforms in the city.  He’d gotten adept at reading it out of necessity.  “He gets redeemed or saved or what have you even after all the shit he’s done.”

“I didn’t take you for a lover of any country’s classics,” Pitch noted, leaning back far enough to crack open one of the paneled doors on the low cabinet.  Like Jack’s remained fixed on his collection of books, his eyes skimmed over the selection of bottles before curling his fingers around the neck of one that was almost offensively green.

“I’m not,” Jack snorted, still listening to the sounds of Pitch pouring a second drink rather than brothering to watch.  The words were almost reassuring- god forbid he come off more educated than he was.  “I haven’t actually _read_ it.  I stayed with a man though, in Paris.  He liked that kind of stuff.  Important books and unconventional heroes or what not.”    ‘Man’, he supposed was a subjective title for the flat-mate he’d imposed himself on during the summer months.  He’d been a few years older but as washed out as him and with features that looked even more like he should be looping through fairy rings in shaded forests.  They’d taken a week to go north and wind through the countryside that was the French speaking bits of the Rhineland.  It was the only time he’d seen him stop looking otherworldly and start looking natural in his surroundings.  It had been a hazy June through August and they hadn’t done much at all most of the time in Paris until the sun went down.  And then he had been given wandering tours into all the hidden away places, all the holes in the wall the city of lights had to offer.  Some better intentioned than others but all of them had been an adventure. 

He’d found a few places like that in Berlin.  He’d confirmed the stories of boys with flushed cheeks and painted lips and glittering eyelids.  He liked that brazenness.  It was the brazenness Pitch carried around with him that held his attention longer.  Because the other was rough hard features and he wasn’t.  Because he wondered what features like that looked like softened with jewel tones.  And because he was tenuous and noncommittal- but he wasn’t cold like the dark haired man at his back.  Not yet.   “He was in the war apparently on the western front so he didn’t like to talk much at all.  When he did it was about that stuff- stuff he liked.  Stories, I guess.  He taught me how to play some violin too but I’m still shit at it.”

“Mhh-“ the acknowledgement was almost pointedly disinterested as it welled up in Pitch’s throat.  Everyone knew someone who had been in the war and didn’t like to talk much these days.  Everyone knew a boy or two who liked stories.  There was another scornful chuckle rolling across his tongue as he stepped over to Jack’s half of the room, setting the drink he’d poured on the empty ledge of his shelf at shoulder-height.  Since the other had been so opposed to brandy after all.  “Paris,” it was repeated like a mild, half amused, curse.

“What-?” Jack shot back, eyeing the glass that had been set down on the makeshift surface.  There was no obvious answer for what the champagne colored drink was.  “Not _worldly_ enough for you?”

“Vermouth-“ Pitch supplied idly to the unasked question, his own attention sweeping over the swath of his personal library in front of him.  He’d had some years to get it together now but it was still more hastily assembled than he would have liked.  “Sweet, since that’s most likely better suited to the maturity of your palette.”  Jack rolled his eyes but plucked up the glass anyway.  “And no, it’s plenty _worldly_ it’s just also _clichéd._ Is that your version of not cowering in corners and following the train tracks in?  You wander into any city earning attention these days and find some poor sap of a man to leech off of and play muse and lover to?”

“Careful-“ Jack couldn’t help the almost obscenely full-bodied laugh that spilled out of him as he eyed over the drink in his hand.  He bit at his lip through it did nothing to hide the broad crooked grin that had claimed his features.  “ _That_ sounds an awful lot like jealously.  Anyway, it’s bullshit.  We weren’t lovers-“  Lovers implied commitment and he’d never bothered to dish that out to anyone- or any place for that matter.  Lovers implied something weighty that he’d never shared with another person.  The weightiest thing Paris had given him were slow afternoons spent leaning on each other while sketching and reading and waiting for the sun to go down.  “I think he liked that we were similar but opposites.  Kind of storybook-ish, right?  He met a girl a couple weeks before I left, Katherine something or other- that was even more storybook and fairytale so I caught a train to Brussels and then I came here after a month.”  He pursed his lips slightly around the swallow of vermouth he finally took, rolling it across his tongue as he tried to form an opinion on it.  It was headier than the brandy but with nowhere near as much bite so he would take it.  Pitch watched him out of the corner of his eye momentarily before the volumes before him had his direct attention once more.

“And how bettered the city is by your presence,” he sneered dryly, earning another amused quirk of Jack’s lips.

“That can’t be my method of operation anyway,” the younger man added with a hum that clung to the edge of the words around the next mouthful of his drink that he took.  Cloying was an almost better word.  Cloying and heavy.  This flat was like that.  Pitch was like that.  He hadn’t lasted two nights because the other stuck imperceptibly like pipe smoke and because he offered a chance to ignore the things that had attached themselves to him already in the city.  North, Toothiana- he could feel that he wore a slightly different facet of himself around Pitch.  “I like you better already and I don’t think you’re looking for a muse- and we aren’t lovers.”  He threw Pitch a look that was mockingly coy under his lashes, getting a tight but smooth smile in return.

“No,” the dark haired man agreed around the rim of his own short glass.  “We’re not.”  There was finality to it without it being final.  Jack presented himself casually and spoke about the people who should have left an impression on his life just as casually.  He reflected on them like they wouldn’t matter in the long run.  The deed was done so it was done.  It was an irritatingly familiar mindset.

“You never told me-“ the younger man at his shoulder interjected in a way that managed to be fluid.  “Why _you_ came to Berlin the other night.”

“Didn’t I?”

“No,” Jack reassured him with a dry snort of laughter.  There was nothing hard about the drink he was still working on but it warmed something just under his breastbone anyway, made the upturn of his lips a little bit smoother.  “You flipped the question on me by insulting me which I guess is your round about way of getting handsome young men to come home with you.  And then we were a little bit busy by the time we got settled here.”  Pitch inclined his chin enough to acknowledge the second half of the statement.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Frost-“ he exhaled.  There was no dust on the shelves for his breath to stir.  Handsome- maybe.  But handsome still wouldn’t be his word of choice for the other.  “I came here to rot.”

“Rot?” Jack echoed like the silent street had traffic and pedestrians passing by outside of the window that would have drowned out the word and made it necessary for Pitch to repeat it.

“Rot,” he confirmed loosely, setting his all but empty glass near the edition of Faust that had caught the younger man’s eye for a second time.  “I told you, there’s nothing about redemption that’s interesting to me.  There’s nothing appealing about charity or morality.  War teaches you to appreciate instant gratification.”  He sidestepped with an easy grace that lacked the jaunty notes Jack seemed to perpetually carry himself down the street with.  With a low breath he placed his palms against the edge of the shelf level with them, effectively pinning Jack between his arms as he stood at his back.  His index finger brushed carelessly against the spine the anthology of Greek myths he’d seen fit to add to his collection.  There was a bookseller in Mitte that he favored with his business- at least the man knew which pieces to carry more than a German translation of.  Greek, in any of its forms was, admittedly, not a strong suit of his.  Maybe a third of the way into the book, a few pages were dedicated to the story of Apollo and his doomed boy of a lover, Hyacinth.  Jack’s shoulders straightened out a little with his sudden proximity, prying a flash of teeth out of the smirk already on his lips.  “I wanted a city that suited that need.”

He wouldn’t use the word handsome for Jack because he could still see him silhouetted in his kitchen window.  There were mellow notes in early morning sunlight even when the snow it reflected off of made it sharper.  That was appropriate.  He was too young to be harsh- but the angles on him, his sharp jaw line and wind-chaffed voice, made him too old to be anything properly fey.  Hyacinth was appropriate.  Fair-faced enough to attract the attention of two gods and done in by choosing between them- though not before Apollo had pushed him toward adulthood.  His features remained lovely even while taught to pull songs from lyres and keep his fingers steady against a bowstring.  Jack had chased him down at the club often enough that he had seen him there even when he was not intruding on his evening.  Seen the way he would effortlessly chat with the men Toothiana introduced him to in passing.  America was, no doubt, a reoccurring topic.  The other side of the Atlantic was apparent in Jack’s English.  He wondered if any of them realized the boy they were conversing with was just as comfortable slipping away when the world got too close as he was offering them the grins that he did.

“You think-“ Jack’s voice slipped in over his thoughts as he downed the last of the vermouth his glass had to offer, setting it precariously next to Pitch’s own unfinished drink.  He twisted between the slim arms that had him corralled- though he pressed into the older man faintly rather than lean away as his eyes slipped up from the knot in his tie to his eyes.  His brow was arched despite the faint knit in it.  “That Berlin is rotting?”

“I think,” Pitch countered smoothly, derisively.  The pressure he’d placed on his palm as he pressed it into the wood left a small indent as his hand dropped away to cup the clean angle of Jack’s jaw instead.  His thumb dragged across the other’s neck, briefly finding the dull, even pace of his pulse under his translucent skin.  “That it’s too full of glitter and doom to do anything else.  This city is wasting itself.  I’m trying to do the same before it’s too late to enjoy the process.  We’re a match made in heaven.  Is that getting too close for you, _Jack?_ Acknowledging the pitfalls and the parts that are wearing a little thin?”   

Jack pursed his lips slightly as though he was a considering response, though he didn’t hurry into one.   Did he ignore the day-to-day, almost domesticated violence that existed here more than it had in Paris or New York?  Maybe, maybe he did.  It seemed to exhausting to do anything except ignore it.  Plenty of boys turned men hadn’t come home to Michigan but a few had come back a little more than themselves- if they were to listen to the medals pinned to their chests.  For sacrifice and bravery.  Heroics were too removed from him, for him to imagine getting wrapped up in them.  He reached up despite the slender fingers still settled against his jaw, loosening Pitch’s tie enough to slip the first two buttons of his neatly pressed shirt free of their holes.  The bruises he’d been offered a glimpse of earlier were laid bare.  If he had bothered to reach his whole hand around them it would have still lined up perfectly- just like it had when he’d left them in the first place.  Instead he settled for pressing his thumb against one of the darker spots for the length of a few steady heartbeats.  He must have coaxed a phantom ache out of it because Pitch’s breath stuttered silently but clearly under the touch, his eyes fluttering shut for a passing second.

“… Why’d you lend me that coat?  Why’d you give me a way back in?” he questioned.  Maybe Berlin was rotting but he couldn’t imagine he’d still be here by the time it decomposed.  “Since we’re not lovers.”  The repeated words were drier than they had been the first time around.  Pitch smiled slimly, allowing the other’s cold fingers to remain near his throat as he reached for his drink once more.  He finished it with one smooth swallow, letting it sit, sharp, in the back of his mouth for a lingering moment.  He had thought of taking Jack home as sucking the poison from a wound.  But it was a botched metaphor.  The slight, pale haired adolescent was too blithe to be toxic.  Berlin was the wound and they were both in it.  And Jack… Jack was an infection like him waiting to happen, if only he could push him in the right direction.

“We’re not…” he exhaled again in repeated agreement, resting on the words and stretching then thin.  Hyacinth was not a metaphor with a fallacy in it.  Apollo had worshipped his youth and his beauty- and then his love for him had destroyed him. With the West Wind’s help.  He wouldn’t pretend he could offer Jack love but the irritated, twisted interest that had allowed him to bring the boy into his home in the first place… that wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination.  “But we could come to an arrangement.”

“Arrangement-?”  Jack’s fingers stilled on the collar of the dark haired man’s shirt, his lips parting faintly. For the first time he felt it was okay to allow confusion into the way his brow line arched.  At least he felt that Pitch was expecting it.

“Meet me at the club tomorrow night.”

“That’s an arrangement?”  The scoff in his voice was as blatant as his confusion.

“That’s an arrangement,” Pitch supplied, tilting his head back just enough that eye contact became difficult but the bruises were once more revealed as a sour flash in the poor lighting.

“Arrangement sounds a little like you’re asking to take me out-“ Jack snorted as he finally slipped free from between Pitch and the high bookshelf, crossing into the center of the sitting room in a way that had him walking almost entirely on the balls of his feet before he settled flat on the floorboards once more.  ‘Arrangement’ sounded a little like the other was asking him out with the same lack of expectations that he offered in all of their interactions.  The word didn’t set his nerves aflame like North’s had when he mentioned home- somewhere to come back to and feel safe in.  There was no safety in that idea yet.  Not for him.  “Alright then, let’s _arrange_ something together.”  It had been dark but his hand at the nape of Pitch’s neck was not the only thing caught in his thoughts.  There were gasps, breaths hissed through teeth, the feeling of a knee digging up into the small of his back and pressing him _closer._ It was a waste of time to deny that he enjoyed this- enjoyed getting beckoned further into the parlor.  Pitch’s interest in him was detached and unassuming.  That was intoxicating.

“Meet me there at eight,” Pitch supplied as he collected both of their glasses from their resting place.  He deposited them beside the ashtray with a disinterest that suggested he would return to them later.   His fingers occupied themselves with pulling his cigarette case free of his vest pocket instead, balancing one between his lips before he offered them out to Jack.  There was a dry laugh on the younger man’s tongue but he accepted one anyway.  He hadn’t bothered to buy his own since he’d last seen Toothiana.  He had no real intention to- it always slipped his mind when he went out.  The first lungful of smoke he drew in as Pitch lit it for him remained trapped in his lungs a lingering moment longer than the one the older man inhaled himself.  It flowed out of the thin space between his lips the same as ever- pallid, lazy.

“You going to kiss me tonight or what?” he questioned wryly around his next drag, free hand combing through his cropped hair in a fruitless effort.  Pitch arched a brow neatly, something like self-satisfied amusement claiming his features.

“Not tonight, Frost.  Take the coat, since you neglected to bring on of your own once more, and go home.”

“What-?  That’s it?”  Jack would have bothered with anger if he hadn’t been thrown off first and foremost.  The older man inclined his head faintly, gesturing with the cigarette trapped between his fingers to the sitting room doorway.

“Yes,” he stated through his teeth,  the hiss of machinery warming up.  “Go reassure whoever you left behind in a mad rush to get here that you’re still in one piece and on the right side of the law.”

“How the hell do you figure I didn’t tell anyone where I was going-?” The younger man’s lips twisted up like a challenging sneer was threatening to claim them.  He stopped the expression short of what it could have been.  Pitch was right.  He’d been disconcertingly right more than once now.

“Because boys like you don’t comment on their departures.”  Pitch closed the space between them again, his hand settling between Jack’s shoulder blades.  For a moment he let his fingers rest there, thumb feeling out one of the subtle bumps of his spine through the thin fabric of his shirt.  It broke as he gave him a brisk and succinct push toward the door.  “They only announce their arrivals.  Now get.  Or maybe I’ll be too busy to make an appearance tomorrow night- since you seem to have such a full schedule already.”  The look he was thrown over a narrow shoulder suggested there were plenty of sharp-tongued protests Jack could have dreamed up.  Instead his lips pursed in annoyed consent.  His wave was also short and punctuated by the his own cigarette but he passed into the hall with a short breath and not much else.

Pitch leveled his smoke with his mouth once more, inhaling slowly into the sound of his door opening and latching shut behind itself after a minute more.  Nothing in him wanted to be redeemed- for personal or public crimes- so he couldn’t be Faust.  He would sell his mortal soul for a smaller price than youth and human enlightenment.  Mephistopheles though, was a role within his reach.  And Hyacinth and Apollo was a fine allusion.  Lord Henry and Dorian Gray were better.  Wasting himself was a slow process and he needed to idle the time away with something.  Sanderson was fine, but the man was his own destruction.   And here Jack had gone offered himself up.  He could worship his youth well enough.  It wasn’t hard to admire his features, heavily shadowed, above him on his bed.  It was his beauty then, that he would wreck by the end of this.  Jack, no doubt, saw an affair to reminisce on a few years down the line.  He saw a boy to be bent and broken across his knee. 


End file.
